The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

I've been on a minor hunt lately to see if I can find smart home light control which makes sense, or some technologies to put together which would.

The basic problem I've had is I've been dealing with adding new light switches in my house through old wall chases - this is miserable (or impossible). But in 2021, why do I need to pull 3+ wires to a light switch to get a light to control (and god help you if you need a dual 2-way switch - up to 6). Why can't I just run live/neutral?

The other problem is the excessive use of wifi: we have powerline ethernet, why can't communications be implemented as a low bandwidth wired protocol over a wiring system I already have?

My ideal IoT home automation would solve both of these: no wifi, use powerline ethernet (with a bridge unit somewhere for the automation), and let me go all in on decoupled switches and lighting. And then whoever does this, target selling it straight to electricians because we'd be talking huge cost-savings and simplifications for wiring up new builds, and retrofits could be handled the same.

Let me fully separate my control points and let's just commit to getting the basic technology right - if my car can be CANbus wired, why can't my house?

Well spotty WiFi and internet connectivity issues probably aren't the homeowners fault either...

The fault probably lies with the ISP, the router manufacturer, or someone else. Let the gadget manufacturers guarantee pay out, and they can try to chase the ISP themselves. If the issue doesn't get fixed, they can simply say "IoT doorbell (reliability guarantee excludes use with Comcast)"

If you're interested in spending a bunch of money buying stuff again, wifi 6e APs are trickling out from the usual vendors. If your local spectrum is congested, the new 6ghz band might be nice.

I personally think that the 'smart home' is a very good concept and has great potential - and can bring benefits even today. This is specially true if you are not neurotypical or have any issues (like forgetfulness). I often forget to do thinks like turn off the coffee machine. My automation ensures that this is done(either by timer, or when I leave the house), that the security system arms when I'm off the house, proper lights are turned on and off, that the robo vacuum won't start until my 3d printer is done printing (it will also turn it off), will turn on air filters when the air quality drops, etc.

That said, the state of the industry is ridiculous. Wifi is extremely convenient and the way to go (IMHO) for the vast majority of devices. It's not well suited for some battery powered sensors due to power constraints - Zigbee works, so does Bluetooth LE. Or everything could just use Bluetooth for all I care. But those protocols are not the problem (despite the industry trying to push CHIP or whatever the new name is).

No, the problem is the software. The insistence on doing stuff in the Cloud when there's no reason to do so. All the incompatible protocols and setup hoops one have to jump. All the political and monetary bickering that causes companies to deprecate 'integrations' or otherwise break functions.

Look, most devices are a combination of switches (usually on and off, a freaking bit!), some numeric values coming from sensors. Maybe strings for good UX. That is it. How many different ways of flipping bits do we need? How complicated do we really have to make retrieving a device status or a temperature value?

I just need to be able to read some simple values and flip some bits back in response - using an encrypted channel. That's it. IF one wants to do this over the Cloud to control stuff remotely, fine. Every single device with software from unknown provenance wanting to phone home - and then forcing me to try to get different clouds to talk to one another?! No thank you.

You can even buy their pre-installed box, ready to go.

It has some warts, but my automation would not be viable without it. I specially like the NodeRED integration - even if I think that NodeRED is quite quirky and %#@!% sometimes, it's still neat to be able to write automations without programming much. I do plenty of that on my day job. Also a great visual aid to explain to non-technical people.