dd-wrt is very a powerful firmware compared to ASUS Merlin, but the UI leaves a lot to be desired. It’s very close to editing a config file and there’s little help to what each setting. The developers of dd-wrt didn’t invest time in designing the web administration interface and used the most basic primitive HTML forms so there are no tooltip that explains the features and the interaction between different settings.

There are also some confusing (nonsensical) UI design that are a lot less work to the developer but confused users to no end. Here are the examples I’ve found so far:

• Enabling remote admin through SSH (for embedded linux command prompt) is a two step process out of the box. You’ll need to first enable SSHd from Services -> Secure Shell before enabling SSH Management from Administration -> Management (otherwise it’s greyed out)
• The router username (user modifiable) for dd-wrt applies to web UI only. SSH’s username remains root. They share the same password though (so login and password are decoupled in dd-wrt, they are effectively two passwords in practice except they don’t put asterisk over the username as you type). ASUS Merlin firmware’s login is consistent across both web page and SSH
• Cron jobs is from a bare environment which means you need to manually define the paths and specify the user in the cron job syntax. e.g.
  PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin
* * * * * root {command_to_execute}