If you want to have an incredibly powerful router that's easy to set up and manage, you can't go wrong with the Netgear Nighthawk X6. This dual-band wireless router uses MU-MIMO to support three separate Wi-Fi bands, and it's one of the only ones on the market that offers such an impressive combination of features at this price.
The Nighthawk X6 can operate in several modes, allowing you to use it as an access point, a wired bridge or as a repeater to extend your home network. Its Gigabit Ethernet ports are also up to the task of handling multiple connected devices, and it has two USB ports for attaching a hard drive. You can easily control the router from the genie app or from its Web interface. From the latter, you can elevate security settings, set up email notifications, and create a personal FTP server or Dynamic DNS.
Linksys recently released a version of this router called the WRT1900ACS, which looks identical to its predecessor from the outside but has upgraded to a 1.6 GHz dual-core Marvel Armada 38X processor and doubled RAM to 512 MB. It also removed the fan and integrated both Marvell radios into its main board.
The router still supports all of the consumer-level wireless security protocols that you'd expect, but it lacks DLNA media server capability and doesn't have support for Time Machine backups for Mac computers. Linksys says it's engaged with the DD-WRT community to bring these features to the router, but the company can't give me an estimate of when they might become available.