It sounds like the specs are largely useless for ranking consumer routers, but crowdsourced user reviews are still useful.
A couple of years ago I bought a Netgear D7000v2 VDSL modem/router and it was a piece of junk. It took minutes to start up after power-on, any attempt to use the USB drive sharing functionality would lock up the router requiring a power cycle, one firmware upgrade broke its ability to sync to VDSL (luckily I still had an old firmware binary handy, so I could revert it) and when I finally threw in the towel on it and switched to the $1 bundled modem that came with my new broadband service, suddenly I was synching at 25% higher speed. Never buying another Netgear product again. They used to be good, dammit.
A couple of years ago I bought a Netgear D7000v2 VDSL modem/router and it was a piece of junk. It took minutes to start up after power-on, any attempt to use the USB drive sharing functionality would lock up the router requiring a power cycle, one firmware upgrade broke its ability to sync to VDSL (luckily I still had an old firmware binary handy, so I could revert it) and when I finally threw in the towel on it and switched to the $1 bundled modem that came with my new broadband service, suddenly I was synching at 25% higher speed. Never buying another Netgear product again. They used to be good, dammit.