Well, as a well experienced user of Linksys routers, I find this more than a litte disapointing. I read through this entire thread and hoped that Linksys would see the error of their ways. At my condo, I have Comcast during the week and Charter Broadband on the weekends at my other residence. I had a NetGear R7000 on DD WRT NEWD at the condo until about 6 weeks ago when I bought the WRT1900AC. The R7000 was set up with static DNS. I attempted to place static DNS in this appliance to improve upon the questionable performance of Comcast. No dice, just would not resolve. So, I am stuck with the ISP provided service. But, for $250.00 for a "home" router you should expect that this basic function would not be configured in the manner of supporting the Linksys "smart wifi" scheme.
Hopefully, they will see it differently....but, they certainly missed the mark.