Reverse engineering things can be a fun challenge - but not if your purpose is not to have fun analyzing it, but to do something else, like actually use the device you bought. If RE is not something you want to do but you have to - it's more like frustrating than interesting.
This, and also it can become a whack-a-mole game with vendors threatened by the FCC, possibly ending up in shit like encrypted firmware. Go ahead and hack that.
If you're buying a device to replace the stock firmware with something customised to your liking, then you're already in the hacker mindset, so having to tinker that little bit harder surely shouldn't be much of a burden.
There is a slight difference between flashing a custom firmware (right from the stock one, no RS232+TFTP or JTAG), and hacking your way through a locked bootloader.
Only in the amount of effort one is willing to expend in doing so, and learning any necessary skills. It's only a happy accident that so many (relatively inexpensive) routers are easily flashable with custom firmware, not an entitlement.
