Probably long...
They obviously don't spend as much time in making good firmware simply because they don't want to invest in that too much.
The firmware is no longer for the more advanced users, but they design it to be easy to use, while remaining slow
On hardware asus is working imo.
Soon they'll releae the rt-n76u, the router that the rt-n16 shoud have been: with 5GHz
also the RT-N56U is interesting, not because it has bad internal intennas, but because it uses a different chip manufacturer
might be a hint that asus is heading to a different manufacturer for more power... dunno
asus is more into motherboards, laptops and soundcards at the moment. not too many people are aware of asus networking products (around here). They usually go for netgear or something, because the salesman says its from cisco... great