There's a site called SmallNetBuilder that has very good technical reviews by knowledgeable people. This is some research I did about a year ago. I look for products that have less than 20% of their reviews at 1 or 2 stars out of 5. Anything more than that is a red flag to me that something is wrong. Then I calculate a price per performance ratio in $ per star which is an indicator of how much I'm paying for quality.
WAN to LAN price/performance - these were the routers with the better price per performance ratio as rated on SmallNetBuilder's site.
In order of $/star:
ESR9855G EnGenius Multimedia Enhanced Wireless N Gaming Router with Gigabit $20.50/star. $82 Newegg, 4.5 stars/22reviews on Google, 3. 1-2 star reviews 14%, probably not enough reviews to be meaningful.
E3200 Cisco High Performance Dual-Band N Router gigabit $27.25/star $109 minus $30 special Amazon 4 stars/142 reviews, 15 1-2 star reviews 11%, 4.5 stars on Google/485 reviews
RT-N56U ASUS Black Diamond Dual-Band Gigabit Wireless-N Router $31/star $124, 4 stars/449 reviews, 82. 1-2 stars 18%
Airport Extreme Base Station 5th gen, A1408, MD031LL/A, $170, 4.5 stars/135 reviews, 16. 1-2star 12%, 10 1-star $37.78/star
WNDR4500 Netgear. N900 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router $45/star. $180 4 star/160 reviews, 42. 1-2 star. 26%
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not ranked in any particular order
Product HD Media Router 2000 DIR-827 gigabit D-Link $142. 3.5 stars/6 reviews amazon
Product N750 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router WNDR4000 Company NETGEAR $126. 3.5 stars/168 reviews, 39 1-star Amazon
Product Maximum Performance Wireless-N Router Linksys E4200 gigabit Cisco $159 - $30 gift card special, 3.5 stars/385 reviews/100 one -two star reviews
Product 300Mbps Wireless N Router with Gigabit Switch. ESR9850 EnGenius $60 amazon. 3.5 stars/22reviews
Product N600 wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router. WNDR3700v2 Netgear. $99 Amazon, 3.5 stars/781, 155. 1-star
Product N750 DB Wireless Dual-Band N+ Router
F9K1103 Belkin $100 Amazon 3stars/129 reviews, 50 1-2star
They not only have good reviews on SmallNetBuilder, but they have some great performance plots of a lot of products. I used their price/performance plots to select routers to go assess for price and user experience/quality (star ratings). There's likely new ones on the plots since a year ago besides the ones I looked at above.
Note that the LinkSys E4200 did appear to have some issues, as 100 of the 385 reviews were 1-2 stars. However, that was a year ago, and maybe they've released some firmware updates that fixed their issues.
Note that the Cisco E3200 though was rated very good, and one of the best buys at the time. So go figure.
I ended up buying the Apple AirPort Extreme which is a great value. People always bad mouth it for being expensive, but it looks very competitive when you start assessing the user experience and quality ratings....one of the top 4 after I got done looking at all of those above. I do have 2 Macs, 2 iPhones, and 2 iPads in the house, so I was really just trying to assure myself that it was worth the investment. It has worked flawlessly for a year. The other ones at the top would likely be very good choices as well, excepting maybe the first one (EnGenius) because at the time it really didn't have enough reviews to be relevant-it likely has a lot more reviews by now.