Terrible ping spikes (?) on Linksys E8450, despite fast internet connection

I suggest that you test with setting CAKE at 10Mbit/s upload and download. You can try running a ping test and saturating the upload and download and monitoring for RTT increases. The adaptive rate project, although not designed to be used for fixed bandwidth connections could be leveraged to help see what's going on with your connection since it monitors RTT with a very high frequency and plots it out to log file together with load etc.