I recommend
www.smallnetbuilder.com and go to their rankers.
I've bought 8 routers over my lifetime starting with 802.11b. I tried so many variants from just about every manufacturer. If you were to ask me my opinion, I would say that EVERY manufacturers can make a great router, and turn around and make utter crap.
I recommend picking a brand that has a large eco-systems of devices. Here's why: Lets say you buy a brand new router and it comes with spicy features. Unfortunately they are vendor specific. So if you buy a secondary product (like a range extender/bridge/AP) it may not be able to take care of all the features offered by that router. This includes features like wireless hand-off (same SSID) where your devices automatically connect to the best wireless device as you walk through your house network. This requires communication between devices that isn't quite a standardized yet even though there are rough "rules" for it. So to get this feature to work you'll need components from a matching vendor which apply updates across all their products to work together.
Unless you are tech challenged, stay away from MESH packages. They are often inferior for the money.
I love my R7800 and I have an EX7000 which has some very nice options for extending my network and maintaining a very high throughput. I can walk about 150 feet from my router and outside my house and still get a usable signal.
I also have power line adapters (Netgear PL1200's) which work in a bad spot (like my basement) But I never managed to get over 80mbps throughput) It's highly reliable, but slow. I use these to add ethernet downstairs in the basement. Wifi signals are notoriously bad there. powerline signal shouldn't leave your home. The signal quickly degrades with distance. But if other people live in an apartment, I would engage in optional encryption.
A lot of people here like TP-Link/Archer. They are a smaller player and they make good stuff, but support is not as broad. And I've seen numerous threads asking for help. For they money there are better options.
Unless you are a good embedded linux shells, stay away from Open WRT routers. I've seen a number of flaky implementations like the Netgear R7000. The complaints are rife on that forum about broken stuff.
That said, probably the best consumer router on the market is the Netgear R7800 for $200. Excellent range, stability, features, and ease of use from dedicated app, or through the web interface. It receives regular security and regular stability updates. It allows a great deal of configuration like seeing attached devices, being able to turn each device on/off by schedule (based on MAC) and classification of each network device with labels and icons so you know what you are dealing with..But it does have it's flaws. It handled my 42 devices without flaw and rarely needed a reboot. That said, I have repurposed it as an Access Point now as I have a dedicated DPI firewall.
MU-MIMO is a joke and never really worked right. Companies like ASUS claimed great improvements in speed, but in fact, MIMO was effectively broken and useless and actually slowed down communications unless you had a 4x4 ($$$$) and clients that worked well with MIMO. The speed increase was marginal at best when MIMO did work properly. ASUS always over promises on new tech and it's often flawed.
I won't touch Linksys any more. Outdated web interface, and limited features. Linksys keeps getting handed around to different companies. The support is quickly dropped (rare to get an update for security fixes and only for a short time) The last Linksys I bought wasn't cheap and it's range was horrible. It kept hanging and dropping the signal. The final straw was when the $100 accessory antennas kept falling refusing to stand up, and the port they connected to broke for no reason. Cracking it open, I saw it was held in place by some very thin plastic.