Being a SW guy at my day job, I really don't want to play SW engineer
on the nights and weekends.
That's exactly why I fell out of love with home automation. The commercial stuff isn't better than HA. I don't want to care what brand my zigbee lights are. I don't want to come home and debug Siri or that god awful Hue app. I just want to turn my fucking lights on.
Home automation promises Star Trek and delivers the bastard offspring of 2001 and Galaxy Quest.
It might be neat to voice activate a mood with lights, music, etc. but the amount of effort to set that up and maintain all of that is literally 100x the effort I'd spend flipping a couple switches and turning on a playlist on a speaker. Literally 60 seconds to do it manually (assuming you know/have setup a playlist).
The only "smart" devices I have are for a room where you want a switch for a lamp but there isn't a switched outlet. Add a smart plug and a physical switch, done. No hub, no scripts, no automation. Its cheaper than buying smart bulbs which usually require some manufacturer's hub/app/nonsense.
My lights work pretty reliably, but I've done hours of research on goddamn lightbulbs. And then automating schedules and programming switches is harder than it should be.
Home automation promises Star Trek and delivers the bastard offspring of 2001 and Galaxy Quest.