Nice in depth review, I've been waiting for a good one! I have a few problems with it though: you guys are a well respected tech site (at least in my opinion, I've been reading your articles for easily 7 years), but did you really just call 25 Mbps "expensive" and "a lot of bandwidth" ??? Did you forget that just a few months ago the FCC mandated that 25 Mbps was the bare minimum to be called "broadband"? That's the base package for a lot of ISPs, at least it is for Comcast, and it's about $40-$60! The next step up is 150 Mbps for about $10-$15 more! What ISP do you have at your house and where do you live that you're only getting about 13-23 Mbps?! At those speeds of course your experience is going to be shit, 23 Mbps is about 2.8 MB/sec which you could probably only stream 720P on, let alone 1080P or 4K, that's what I'd expect a non-tech savvy person to have, not a tech reviewer for a large site. I live in NJ and I have a Verizon Fios 75/75 Mbps pipe along with about 100 channels for the "expensive" (according to you) price of $60! Granted Fios isn't available everywhere, and it's actually more expensive and slower (on the downstream, way faster on the upstream) than what I had with Comcast (150 Mbps/20 Mbps, I was getting a steady 14 MB/sec download from Usenet sometimes as high as 19 MB/sec). Any gamer or tech enthusiast worth their salt knows that 25 Mbps just isn't going to cut it for anything beyond browsing and streaming in 720P without waiting for it to buffer a lot.
Also another mistake you made, you said that "the Buffalo router has a theoretical max of 1.3 Mbps", I'm assuming that's supposed to be 1.3 Gbps.