I'd be interested to know how much the average HN user cares about this. I certainly don't. I'm not even entirely sure how fast my home internet connection is - it's certainly fast enough for me to stream Netflix etc as well as connect to a VPN for working from home. I don't really care about anything else.
(not that my internet connection is always great - it isn't - but that lies with my internet provider, who I have no choice over, so...)
I think there are a lot of smart people on HN, but that doesn't mean they're all interested in all the same things. Tweaking wifi settings just seems like a waste of time to me, and boring to top it off. My interaction with my AP stopped at setting the ssid and passphrase.
Tweaking QoS settings is largely a waste of time nowadays, but only if your router is running an OS new enough to include modern self-tuning QoS algorithms (and preferably a community-maintained project like OpenWRT, because the commercial vendors screw up their deployment of said algorithms).
Even if you aren't going to be hacking on your router much, it still definitely pays to ensure you're using hackable hardware.
Because you get the benefits of those who do hack, simply by installing a recent stable version of OpenWRT. It's no harder than upgrading and configuring the vendor's firmware. If you tie yourself to vendor firmware, you're tying yourself to 5+ year old kernels and all the associated security and performance and stability problems and a much more restricted feature set.
The commercial vendors do an absolutely horrible job of supporting or maintaining their products and they tend to get a lot wrong with the initial software release. The OpenWRT community does a great job of putting out a solid product that works and has sensible defaults, but you can only get the full benefit of their work if you buy hardware that is open to their hacking.
(not that my internet connection is always great - it isn't - but that lies with my internet provider, who I have no choice over, so...)