The main consumer brands don't really have any interest in catering to customers who are willing to go to the trouble of wiring up their house with CAT5/6 cable. Not only are they a small portion of the overall market (and growing smaller still, as wifi speeds have increased at a far faster pace than ethernet), but they tend to be the kind of arstechnica-reading, amateur sysadmin types who are far more demanding of their hardware that the typical customer base for a company like Netgear. This is why mesh systems have exploded in popularity over the past year or so (also due to the availability of hardware for it, you'll notice almost every mesh wifi system around uses exactly the same Qualcomm chipset), as they're a simple solution for people who don't want to wire up their house, but they're pretty expensive and have the exact same problem as wifi repeaters, that a given unit is only going to be able to transmit as good a signal as it gets from the base station.
Ubiquiti's Unifi is effectively a trickle down of enterprise tech, but even they don't actually really advertise it as a consumer system (they have their own mesh system which they aim at consumers). It only really made inroads into the consumer market as those amateur (and often professional) sysadmin types came across it in an enterprise environment (where it's been popular for quite a while now), and realised it's well suited for residential setups too, without anywhere near the price (or complexity) of something like Cisco.
I came across it a few years ago while I was working as a sysadmin for a company that, among other things, did commercial and residential AV installs (things like multiroom audio systems, home cinemas, etc.). Although I was the internal IT guy, I also ended up speccing out a lot of IT systems for residential installs. Because modern AV is so heavily network-based we almost always insisted on handling the network side of things as well on all of our residential jobs (we had a few issues in the early days where customers with network problems would come to us because they couldn't control their AV system with their iPad, and the guys who handled the IT either refused to acknowledge the problem or just disappeared off the face of the earth, so it was a lot easier to just do it ourselves). A lot of the time it was a newly built home (or it was a sufficiently large construction job that we got to do a proper cable run anyway), so I had the benefit of being able to have CAT6 run anywhere and everywhere, which meant, among other things, we could use a proper multiple access point system like Ubiquiti and ensure good wifi coverage throughout the house.
Ubiquiti was really well suited for us because, aside from it being a lot cheaper than most of the other options, it was very easy for our installation engineers to setup, both physically (thanks to PoE) and on the software side. It was also very rare for us to have to have issues with it after installation (and given that labour is typically the bulk of the cost for residential network installs, these things combined can save a lot of money). They also do some more specialist wireless hardware, like outdoor wifi, or point-to-point wireless for connecting a second building you can't run a cable to. What it's not, though, is the absolute fastest-of-the-fast, compared to some of the high-end consumer routers. The newer AC Ubiquiti models are plenty fast for real-world use, though (and you can go with the Pro version if you feel you really need the speed), and if you're running ethernet throughout the house then your devices that most need the bandwidth will probably be hard-wired anyway. This also tends to free up your wireless for devices that actually need it, and unless you're living in a small apartment, a system which gives you very good wifi everywhere throughout the house is usually a better choice than a single-box solution which gives you blazing fast speeds when you're in the same room as the router and a crappy experience when you're at the far corner of the house.
In any case, if you do have an old router lying around, it's worth testing out. It would probably be worth seeing if you can install either DD-WRT or OpenWRT on it, as that gives you the option of running the router as a pure access point (so completely disables all the router functionality which the standard firmware might not allow you to mess with). It also tends to be pretty reliable firmware (although this can vary depending on the device, so make sure to read the release notes for the device you're installing onto).
Apple's airport and time machine products actually tend to be pretty good in terms of speed and coverage (I used an Airport Extreme for a while as a solitary access point in an apartment and it worked great), but I haven't had great experiences trying to use them in multi-access point scenarios. It's definitely worth trying, though, if you've got one lying around.
