The challenge isn't getting a VPN to work...I've already done that. The challenge is to get just the handshake to route over the VPN and then once the streaming video starts, bypass the VPN to get full network speeds.
Ah. I can see why you would want to do that, but I don't think it would be necessary : the speeds I'm getting with IPVanish are *really* good. More than enough to stream two or three things simultaneously without any problem. (eg. normal speeds for my connection are 130 mbps down and 10 mbps up, with VPN enabled this is 70 mbps down and 8 mbps up ; in other words, not noticeable).
It's true, current routers are more expensive than a WRT54G was. I'm now using a Netgear R7000, which cost me about 150 euro. But I'm very happy with it ; it's been rock-stable for me.