R7000 being bricked?!?

So here is my story. I bought 2 different r7000 routers. One awhile ago and another recently.

As my practice I ALWAYS upgrade to the latest RELEASED firmware for security fixes and new features. Well the first one I had, after upgrading the firmware, the 5GHz band was unusable. Everytime I connected to the 5GHz band it would make the router restart. Like it was crashing and restarting every few minutes. Since I bought it second hand I figured it may have been damaged in shipping. So I disabled the 5GHz band and had been running that way for a long time. With the recent update releases (V1.0.9.10_1.2.21) I decided to try again. The upgrade went fine but again it was rebooting when I enabled the 5GHz band. So I went to try to flash it back to an older one and I *THINK* it rebooted in the middle of the update. First one at this point seems to be stuck and no longer bootable (aka BRICKED). I tried the TFTP process to upload but it keeps failing saying it is getting no response.

I decided to order an second one to replace a different older one (again R7000). This one arrived with version  V1.0.4.30_1.1.67 installed. The 5GHz band seemed to be working with this particular router (short test of about 15 minutes with no reboots). So I decided to update to the latest thinking this router must be good then. After the update, I AGAIN started seeing reboots of the router. So I decided to revert back to the older one that seemed to work, but still again saw reboots. I was planning to go back further to the original release thinking maybe a new driver in the image is the issue. So in the middle of installing the oldest version I was comfortable with (V1.0.2.194_1.0.15) IT REBOOTED AGAIN!!! So this is the second one that has bricked on me (same state as the first one). I tried the TFTP update process, with no response from the router. So just out the box and it is bricked.

I don't know if there is older hardware inside or if there is problems with the images themselves but it is sad that this is the state I am in. I am about to try something drastic that seems to work for most people to see if I can recover some use out of these but I need Netgear to do better on this. It is too common to not have been investigated fully and fixed by now.

For any person needing details on these routers I can provide anything you need to help troubleshoot. I don't have any advanced diagnostic tools (yet) but planning on getting a few. I am somewhat technically savy with networking just mostly focused on the programming and not detailed into networking. I am pretty sure (with 2 routers showing the same issue) that this is an internal driver issue that had not been reported or investigated based on other reports and reading about 3rd party firmwares like DD-WRT and Tomato having issues similar. Let me know if there is something that can help someone or if maybe I just have bad luck (not betting on the latter though).