I cannot but agree. In the end I ended up with a S/H Cisco SOHO router - rebadged linksys I think - which was reliable but too much of a room heater and replaced it with a draytek, which has been 100% reliable, but
if you need the internet thats only a few months broadband bill. I've had D link, Netgear and TP-link routers too - all have been at one time or another replaced due to flakiness.Ive got a Netgear whose ADSL performance went suspect after a thunderstorm in use as a WAP. It still isn't 100% reliable.
The use of BIND on root hints seems fine to me. DNS was never a huge network or CPU load. And it allows you to fully control DNS.