I’ve had some trouble with Smart Lighting in the new app and have had to redo them so they would work again. This raised a question or two, the environment is V3 Hub, and the new app as the primary, (I have the old app for custom)
What is the most robust/bullet proof application to use for job scheduling or automation, Webcore, Automations, Smart Lighting? A mix and match based on requirements is probably the right approach but I don’t really know the pros and cons, any guidance?
Don’t use SmartThings. 
No, seriously. It’s a very powerful system but not at all a robust one. As I’ve mentioned many times in the forums, my own requirement For mission critical automations is an MFOP (maintenance free operating period) of at least six months and preferably a year. SmartThings rarely lasts 10 days. 
Just in the last two weeks there have been at least two control outages. (See the status page.) And that’s not counting the scheduled outages of firmware updates which can be neither deferred nor denied and which, for whatever corporate reasons, don’t usually get posted to the status page.
There are a lot of things that I like smartthings for, but running mission critical robust schedules is not one of them.
That said, Of all the smartthings options the most reliable will be smartlighting running locally. But only some devices and only some smartlighting automations are eligible for local operation. And even those will be knocked off by the push updates.
https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/209979766-Local-processing
See the following Thread for some more details:
But again, it all comes down to your individual needs and preferences. Many people don’t even notice when smartthings goes off-line because they might be away from home or it might be a non-critical application.
In my case, I am quadriparetic and live most of my life in one of two rooms. I always notice, and home automation is much more than just a convenience for me. As I said, I do like smartthings for some use cases, but none for which robustness is a critical factor.
Thanks, my end goal is to have a house that doesn’t need as much care and feeding to stay running as it does today, with the end goal being able to stay independent longer as we age.
I am leaning toward non time critical automation in webcore and time critical in smart lighting. My theory is if the hub goes down nothing will work anyway and the likelyhood of corrupting jobs is less in webcore.
I use the new automations and when I need more control I go with WebCore. I also use the smart lighting app with never an issue. Good luck. I have an active system with over 90 items.
SmartLighting for as much as possible. WebCoRE is solid for me with over 250 Pistons across 2 instances. However, eventually, webCoRE is going to be phased out.