Well, now it started working again. And I rebooted a few times before I post this. Not sure why it didn't work the first few times.. Anyways, on the wifi front it seems the eeprom upgrade is making a difference.. more stable. But I am noticing something interesting. I can push to ISP limit when using Windows 10 machine but not from Android phone when using wifi. Not sure what to make of it.
Edit:
Ok, sorry for flooding the thread. It seems my WAN port issue was related to flaky cable. Changed it and it's acting as expected. Meanwhile I put the eeprom from minihere.com site onto Lenovo D1 and it made a difference. With the original eeprom the wifi speeds were jumping up and down, very unstable. With the new eeprom IT IS STABLE! The D1 is on par with D2 maybe even better.. these are initial observationis.. time will tell.. But I am happy I got these two routers to a point where wifi seems stable and usable. Was very close to chucking them in the bin before I tried the eeprom update.
I am working on extending the life of my now ancient Newifi D2 (evidently a v1.1), thanks to info in this thread and elsewhere. It is the second one I have had over the years and this one has nearly become unusable. I am now using it just as an AP and moved router functions to a Nanopi.
It seems all the firmware and eeproms on minihere.com are currently offline, but I have loaded the "art-radio" eeprom one from github linked above. I am continuing to test, and I currently loaded Padavan (3.4.3.9L) just to troubleshoot if the problems lied with OpenWrt or elsewhere. So far, it seems I have no WiFi issues on Padavan.
One key detail to improve Wifi performance is to not attach a USB device, or if you do, use USB 2 only and disable USB 3.
Up until recently I ran Openwrt 18.06.0 (or something, I forgot specifically), since i had worse performance on later versions up to 21. I wonder if anyone with a Newifi D2 with the fixed eeprom is successfully running 23.05.2 or a custom build?