I wish they had tracked down someone from Nat Semi for this. I imagine they would have been somewhat dismayed by some of this.

One of the issues of the perceived low quality is the massive variance in NE2000 silicon. Basically everyone cloned/emulated the chip, but they have subtle variation, features, bugs. So a generic driver like Linux has to deal with a lot of damage.

(Russia, 1996, an IT services company) At some point we got a box of no-name NE2000 cards in OEM packaging with just one floppy with a driver in the box. That driver was magical - it was able to configure pretty much any NE2000 even the brandname ones which were PITA to configure with their own drivers.