[mjcoss]

I'll take a crack at that.
1) powering it from a battery, not a household outlet, and
2) running it around on a robot, instead of sitting on your desk, and
3) close to a lot of DC motors, and other potentially noisy electronics.

There is no way that DLINK product engineers ever envisioned this box running around on a robot. And as such, they made design choices around an expected use case. Now you get a NEBS compliant access point, and we could argue that it might not matter, but these boxes are a long way from that.