I have the WRT-54G and it works well. At home, I have my main PC in the basement hard-wired to it. My wife / son's PC upstairs and my laptop both connect wireless and get excellent signal strength. For general day-to-day use, it's rock solid and works well.
One peculiar issue though. If I try do download torrents using my laptop (wireless) it seems to hog all the router's internal bandwidth. Torrents will download very fast, but I can't surf from that PC, and my other PCs (both hardwired and wireless) will have trouble communicating even with the router. I tried limiting the bandwidth of the torrent client, connection numbers, etc, but that did nothing. Once the problem appears, even stopping the torrent client won't solve the problem. Even once I stop the client, I still can't connect with the the laptop other PCs until I power down the router and restart it. I don't seem to have this problem with my hardwired computer though when using it to download torrents. I've tried configuring the router using its QoS settings to allocate lowest priority to the IP / MAC address of laptop and putting the other computers to high priority. but still no joy.
I don't know what's wrong, but I think it may be time to get myself another router. I think this one may suffer some shortomcings like the WRK-54G and other consumer-level routers you speak of. It's not a show-stopper for me, as I rarely download anything on P2P networks. I tend to use them more to find old, rare stuff, so it's not something that happens often. But still, I'd like to be able to use it reliably regardless what I'm using it to. Due to the sparse sources for the stuff I'm looking for, it tends to take a long time to get a complete file, and it sucks having to shut down my download when I want to use any of the other computers on my network.
