On consumer routers

I read an article today about a bittorrent client which casually mentioned this:

On regular swarms, it performs about the same as any other client. But it also opens 500 simultaneous connections (compared to the Mainline client’s default 80) so it hoses your router almost instantly.

Which speaks to a long-term annoyance of mine. Why are consumer routers from D-Link, NetGear and Linksys so poor? The Internet runs on real protocols that have real requirements, and the average consumer is only stifled by a router that can only hold up under casual web browsing and e-mail checking. Specific models are issued by Linksys for higher-end applications like VoIP, and even they’re stretched to their processing and memory limits. And since your average consumer isn’t aware that they should expect more, they tend not to. I’ve been a happy user of an 800MHz AMD Duron with two PCI based network adapters, and have seen even lower end systems function perfectly for large offices (systems based on an 800MHz VIA C3). Would it cost too much to include a 500MHz CPU, a decent system bus and more than 32MB of RAM?