IT LIVES!
I took out the old router again a little while ago.
Looks kinda lonely in there. I had left the PSU brick and cables in there after I gave up the first time around and reinstalled the old router. You can kinda sorta see the brick laying on the shelf behind the modem.
This time, since I already had the correct phone number for ASUS, I reinstalled the Alien Face Hugger but I only connected the cable from the modem to the router's WAN port and the laptop's cable to the router's LAN port. When I powered it up, I still was seeing red (pun intended) on the WAN LED.
When I typed in the URL (router.asus.com) per the instructions, I again got bupkis so I called up ASUS again, using the correct phone number. The gentleman who answered this time was far, far more competent than the Previous Guy. He had me type in that URL again and, when it failed, gave me one that was all numbers to try; that one worked. It also was a different number that the one Previous Guy had given me (Previous Guy wasn't the brightest crayon in the box). He walked me through doing the basic set up and starting the first firmware update.
After the update had finished, I connected the rest of the Ethernet cables, tested the four that go to my bedroom, removed the old router's wall wart, then cleaned up the cable management a bit. And here is the Alien Face Hugger in all her gory...er...glory.
Right now, my biggest complaint about the Alien Face Hugger is ASUS' lousy, piddle-poor directions.
The dashboard for making settings on this beast is a beast so I'm going to have to do some reading and fiddling around over the next few days (weeks?). I may or or may not want to tweak them. Many of the advanced features include MESH Wi-Fi and Gaming, neither of which I have any need for so I won't bother with those. There's no rush because it's working fine for me right now, it has the latest firmware, and everything that needs to be password protected is password protected.
I did test the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi (currently, I don't have anything that works on 5GHz) and had no trouble connecting. The vast majority of the time, I'm only going to be using Ethernet.
Getting to the Ethernet cables that are plugged into the back of the beast is going to be a beast but not as bad as it was with the old router. The two rear antennas are in the way but, even without them, to remove any cables inside the two outer ones, I'll have to remove all the cables on one side or the other of it to be able to get my fat, little fingers in there. It's still an improvement over the last router because the new one doesn't have that stupid little shelf-like extension on the rear getting in the way like the old one did. I did cut off the anti-snag covers on the connector latches since they make it a bit harder for me to squeeze them enough to release the connectors from their ports.
The LED that I didn't have clue about what it was actually is the LED for the LAN ports. Sadly, all eight LAN ports are represented by that one little ol' LED. The old router had an LED for each LAN port that was useful on occasion. Oh well.
The LEDs can be switched on and off but they aren't excessively bright and there are only three of them on when I'm only using the Ethernet so I'm just going to leave them on.
The body of the Alien Face Hugger is one inch wider than the old router and is a quarter inch narrower but the posts the antenna are on are longer and mounted differently so the beast takes up an additional three inches in length (width is about the same), something the specs failed to mention. Fortunately, I had the room for it.
Someone in a review somewhere suggested that the front feet should have some spacers slipped under them to raise up the front of the router for better cooling so I cut a short strip of 1/4" oak I had knocking about (I never throw away scraps) in half, then stained them (and my fingers) black with a Sharpie. After the "stain" had dried for a bit, I tried a couple different double stick tapes I had to stick them to the front feet of the router but they wouldn't stick. So, I lost my temper and broke out the E6000. E6000 is an industrial adhesive that is popular with crafters because it's clear and sticks like crazy. I put a generous glob on each piece of wood and stuck them to the front feet. It will take at least 24 hours before I know if the spacers will stay stuck.
I haven't decided if I want to replace the modem or not yet. It still meets current standards. I did have to order a shorter WAN cable since the WAN port is on the opposite side of the Alien Face Hugger than it was on the old router (I can't buy diddly-poo in this one horse, Podunk, piddle-squat megalopolis I live in
).
So, if nothing else remarkable happens and nothing blows up, this should finally be the end for quite a while (hey, I heard that collective sight of relief!).
. I tried resetting the modem (power down for 15 seconds or so), then, once it was up, fired up the router again. Again, bupkis 
