I am a short drive from the Ohio Area (Southern California) so i can't tell you a lot about what is going on in Ohio. I can however speculate A lot of persons may be running WRT54 based setups because of how long the project has supported Linksys hardware, but I would strongly recommend looking into the Ubiquiti hardware. It is newer, has higher power RF capability and a stronger receive. It can sit out in the sun, rain, snow, (Just don't throw it in a lake) without needing to make a box, and heat it up or cool it down (-40c to 80c rating). I've seen established networks that have run Linksys gear go out and replace all of it with Ubiquiti (and see significant improvements by doing so)
While we won't likely see Linksys gear disappear, if you are going to spend money on new hardware I would recommend looking at the Ubiquiti gear. When I look at the cost of a new WRT54GL and compare it to a NanoStation I end up with the NanoStation each time.
The one plus I will give of the Linksys gear is the fact that it does have 5 ports switch inside the case (though we just recently saw an issue where that switch seems to have issues so i would have to add an external switch anyways) instead of needing to add one yourself, this can be nicer than a second piece of hardware to allow multiple computers. Welcome to the world of mesh, I hope you find it enjoyable.
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