I 100%, absolutely sympathize with the opening there. The situation really sucks to a surprisingly great extent. At the same time though, it has to be stated that going for a 'dumb, simple' Smart Lights really, really misses an enormous amount of the potential value. Nearly 100% of my smart home is about lights for now using just Philips Hue/HomeKit, though HA remains on my list, but only a tiny percentage is about simply having switches wherever. The true value for me has been in more intelligent color lighting based on layered actions. I change the amount of blue and brightness during the course of the day, so that there's lots in the morning and it's dimmer and ever redder in the evening. Particularly in the winter this has been incredibly helpful for my sleep cycles. It can all be extremely transparent as well since the switches and motion sensors can have time-of-day as well as which-button and number-of-clicks categorization. So hitting the on button always turns the lights on, but the color and brightness mix of a room will be different over the course of the day. Same with outdoors, motion sensors anywhere that can have different colors and activation periods at different times has been great for massively cutting down extraneous blue light at night, which is good not just for humans but for animals and insects as well. I can wake up in the heart of winter when the sun doesn't rise until 8 or later in the morning to a 20 minute long "sunrise" I created myself simulated nicely with a bunch of lights. And more complex logic like "lights all come on when smoke alarm goes off or a basement flood is detected" are also handy.
Again I'm very sympathetic to the shitty state of the ecosystems right now, frequently miserable UI/UX, and massive heaping doses of bullshit companies are constantly trying to pull to extract more ongoing revenue from people for what should be buy-once-and-done products. But it really sucks precisely because yes: smart home features genuinely can be pretty great.
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