My experience with DD-WRT is that it took tons of tweaks and fiddling to get the same router to perform not quite as well as it did pre-flash, including manually tweaking the power outputs of the antenna to get a signal one room away. Recently I bought a new router with failover support and it's so nice that the basic (and advanced) things I want to use just work. Clean UI, sensible organization of settings, actually reliable documentation... all wonderful things. So unless you are okay with lots of fiddling and restarting your router 10-30 times over a weekend, maybe don't use DD-WRT. I have no experience with the others.

Perhaps your router just wasn't quite the fit for it. "Lots of fiddling and restarting your router 10-30 times over a weekend" sounds nothing at all like my experience with OpenWRT and DD-WRT.