Constant issues with Nighthawk XR500 router

Good afternoon.

No choice but write short summary on my experience in using Netgear Nighthawk XR500 and router, including 2x EX7700 mesh extenders. Really dissapointing basic functionality is pretty awful.

Background:

My provider is VM in the uk, on the best broadband package available. I was using the stock router provided for a while before selecting the XR500 to improve performance and coverage. I also purchased 2x EX7700 to eliminate deadspot in house and garden.

Issues

Initially all was working fine when purchased and setup, also attaching the EX7700 putting in another room and had a strong signal. All working ok for some months and upgrading firmware as recommended when new releases became available.

Over time I noticed devices (specifically apple devices) loosing connectivity and when trying to rejoin get prompted for the wifi password, which is correct but is rejected by the router. This is not the case for all apple devices, general fix for this is to reboot the router.

I update the firmware which helped but still happens way too often, resulting in me rebooting the router at least once every 2 days.

The SSID simply dissapears making it unavailable for any device to attach, signal drops and comes back up again intermitently. Again to resolve this issue a reboot of the router is needed.

EX7700 connectivity is now only good when previously was excellent. reviewing the connectivity on the EX7700 itself I can see it can only now connect to the XR500 on 2.4g band when previously it was both 5.0 and 2.4. This means that devices attached to that device will have a degraded service in comaprison to 5.0g throughput. This was not always the, I have not moved EX7700 since initial setup.

Overall really disappointed in this technology, its not cheap and considering purchasing a support agreement to bottom out these issues. At one point I even went back to the stock router provided by VM to make sure its wasn't something else that was causing the problem.

Am I the only one seeing these issues?

If so any advice on troubleshooting or getting a more consistent performance would be appreciated.

My setup:

VM Stock router (configured in modem mode)

XR500 FW:2.3.2.66

EX7700 FW: 1.0.0.210

One final thing the 'Device Manager' on the IOS APP when attached to the XR500 always reports "Sorry, the action was failed. Please try again". Even the error message is poor.