My old router passed away after many years of hard use.
I was very happy about it, it was stable and sturdy, perhaps not very fast but perfect for offroad trips. And it ran linux (Using Tomato).

I'm looking for something a little less ancient to replace this workhorse. It has to be robust and stable.

Any reccomendations?

I'm very happy with a Netgear N450. Open source and can turn off WEP. Available at walmart.

I bought an Asus and thought it was supposed to run alt software but guess it can't. The only advantage is two usb 3.0 ports on it. My cable isp went down and I connected a hotspot to it and it worked to provide internet to the house until cable was fixed.

I have an Asus RT-N56U, which can now be considered obsolete. It has been working well. On the positive side, it has two USB 2.0 ports and is a gigabyte router. (The new routers now come with USB 3.0 ports.) I have a Western Digital USB hard drive attached to one of the router's USB ports. I use that USB drive as a backup drive and to store media that other computers on the home LAN may wish to access.

As a word of caution, the Asus RT-N56U router (from the Linux perspective) does NOT recognize EXT4 (it's in the fine print, of course). I had to format the USB hard drive to EXT3.
The USB drive, of course, was originally formatted with NTFS. Under NTFS the USB hard drive (when attached to the router) seemed to have periodic permission/access file issues. They appear to have been resolved by using EXT3 format.

If I were going to replace a WRT54GL, I would replace it with a WRT54GL. I like Tomato too - that's what I use also. If you need more WiFi speed, sure, investigate newer routers. If you don't need that extra speed, which I don't personally, I'd stick with the tried and true, robust, bulletproof, WRT54GL.

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The WRT54GL is, indeed, a classic.
After the WRT54G version 4.0, they made several new models, mostly using vxware (?) software. They then turned right around and re-released the WRT54G version 4, using the model designation of, WRT54GL. The "L" stands for Linux.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRT54G

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Why are they still so expensive?

I could be cheap. Just seems like they have had that model for 15 years and price should have gone down I'd think.

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I replaced my WRT54G v 2.0 last year with an ASUS RT-AC66U router. Got it flashed with dd-wrt and it's been wonderful so far. I've used it on a 50/1 Mbps cable connection then I moved and transferred it to a new 50/5 Mbps cable connection. Now I am on an 80/30 Mbps fiber connection for about 2 weeks now and it's been wonderful. The only downfall is it only has 4 ports. I need morah!

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I've placed bids on wrt54gl's on an auction site, hoping to get a cheap replacement. I was pleased with the one I had so I'm not going to experiment with new hardware.
Thank you all for your thoughts.