Jed Laundry gave a brief impassioned call-to-arms. We need to stop expecting vendors to encode different systems and sell us different CPE when the actual need is for commonality, not difference.
The way out is to push OpenWRT as a common standard with add-ons, and give the community a chance to get comparable capabilities from any hardware reflecting the NZ UFB: a single solution national network, which clearly demands commonality in the backend.
The other side of this problem is the huge number of old Customer Premises Equipment which have unpatched security holes, broken DNS implementations, and even publicly visible TR-069 (remote management and configuration) enabled.
This has ups and downs, and is unlikely to be popular with the vendors who love marketing differentiation, but had broad support in principle from engineers in the room.