@Ben - Although I agree with this, it is becoming more of a problem with the level of external integrations available. For example, I use SmartRules - I have about 10 rules in there. I need to rebuild each one of them as well…manually. Then there is my Amazon Echo integration and IFTTT. With the integrations, that is A LOT of screenshots and rebuilding. And, my install is not complex at all. In fact, I’m one of your smaller, simpler installations!
So, you can see that the tool is really needed now more than ever. I’m fine with excluding and re-including…that makes sense that it is necessary (I’m an IT guy, so I understand what is happening there). But, there needs to be a tool to at list say “I’m replacing device A with device B” and all the SmartApps and integrations don’t care since it is a replacement at the “device level.” I get the sense that in ST, the hardware IDs are not abstracted from the smartapps and that is why this is taking so long?