I have always had very good luck with netgear routes. Indeed, one needs to often make sure the firmware is up to date, but over the past oh 6+ years, I have had very good success with probably about 20+ routers, switches and access points. I really like their software, historically offering many features like address reservation that are very easy to impliment and use, and access. I have also had good luck with linksys (although there was a period there where I think their quality went down) and their open access wooed me over a few years ago to a router that would run DD-WRT and tomato (which I use now for their great implimentation of QOS on the router)

recently though, netgear announced that they TOO were going to offer AP's and routers that would use the open source communities firmwares :

http://www.myopenrouter.com/

And their pricing is very attractive. I might pick one up to try it, and compare it to the other linksys and buffalos that I have running tomato.

I honestly, would not encourage anyone away from netgear, and actually for the more common consumer user I think they represent a better fit with their UI and features implimentation. Linksys has come a long way in the past few years in that regard as well.