I have many nerdy friends who have been Linux users for ages. But most of them don’t know such a thing as Openwrt exists or have never bothered to give it a try. It’s a very fun piece of software to play with and can be extremely useful for routing traffic. Wondering why it isn’t more popular/widely used.
I only buy routers that are compatible with dd wrt. I don’t have time to deal with stuff randomly not working or being unreliable just because I did something more complicated than modem => router. dd wrt doesn’t necessarily make it so that you never have problems, it’s just that dd wrt gives you the tools to actually solve them.
I haven’t ever messed with open wrt just because dd wrt has always served my needs perfectly fine.