I really don’t share your optimism regarding the ST expansion in terms of thermostat capabilities. I have always strictly followed the existing ST standard capabilities (here is a good example: do you know that thermostatSetpoint should be the median between the cooling/heating setpoints where the thermostat is set to ‘auto’?)…Well, it’s important to know when you want to control the smart vents in ‘auto’ mode (especially when you are doing proportional control of the vents in a zone).
An ecobee thermostat and a z-wave thermostat are too different beasts (even a Nest thermostat is not currently able to support the resumeProgram command as an example)…So, there is no way that ST will able to standardize every aspect of a smart thermostat like ecobee.
However, to make all the ST thermostat DTH’s code more compliant, I suggested more than 2 years ago to introduce the concept of metacode (on top of the existing metadata section) to force the implementation of all the ST thermostat’s capabilities in all thermostat DTHs.
The same concept could be applied to other ST standard sensor/actuator capabilities…
Still waiting to see any action on the ST side…
Regards.