I really don't understand why they feel they need to develop their own full firmware rather than contribute to another project like OpenWRT or CeroWRT? Anyone involved care to tell us why?
Yea, that's surprising. Looking at their github repo it looks pretty hopeless to backport their improvements into LuCI/OpenWrt/CeroWrt.
To me it would make more sense to either a) help improve LuCI/OpenWrt/CeroWrt or b) educate consumers about which commercial Wi-Fi routers are good/bad from a security perspective. Their current approach seems to do neither.