Here’s my perspective. I’ve been using ST since exactly 1 year ago from today, and like @Mike_Maxwell, I’ve not chimed into this thread since I too have nothing to complain about from a functional perspective. I’ve got just over 120 devices of all types, almost all all physical (and just zwave and zigbee), with just a handful of virtual; and many of those virtual devices are fed from physical devices that are 3-in-1’s, etc. My sunset/sunrise events have been flawless (except during ST’s major infrastructure change a while back), and my smartapps run just as well - whether they’re ones I’ve created or built-in ones leveraged through the Dashboard. Over the next few days I even plan on adding 10 more physical devices.
I don’t use the Dashboard much except to see a quick status of all things like my doors, windows, lights, smoke/CO2 detectors, and for apps associated within those - turn on lights when there’s motion, or sunrise/sunset, or danger/alarm conditions. I control all things through Things and have all my things in groups. Even my wife uses ST regularly, and we’ve even used an old Samsung S4 phone as a “remote” via ActiON Dashboard for our guest room for visitors to use.
I also do not use or rely on any mobile presence device. That “feature” has been a PITA since I’ve started, but instead I’m using ST’s zigbee presence tags in all my cars to trigger certain conditions. Works perfectly to turn on lights, set temps, etc - but I still prefer closing my garage door the old fashioned way (I am using the tag in my car as an experiment, but not the wife or kid’s cars yet).
Maybe my positive experiences with ST are related to building out a large mesh network, or not relying on mobile presence, or sticking with only zwave/zigbee devices, or not trying to integrate Sonos/Hue/Product “X”, or all of the above. I agree that the IDE should be faster, latency could be improved, new device support needs to happen faster, and promises of hub v2 really need to deliver. I was also part of the Android beta, and compared to what was there back then, it is a lot better; but the app still needs to be improved for usability - naming tiles instead of icons, user roles, 2 factor authentication, etc.
Is there room for improvement, yes; but it has been improving. The silence we’re all experiencing today is deafening, and I am hoping CES reveals a lot of good news from ST. I’ll stick with ST through their next hub release and the challenges that will bring, but I’ll always keep an eye out for someone in the HA marketplace to clearly step out and take a lead because there is a large opportunity for someone to do so.
