Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can write a control system easy enough to do this. I'm kind of an expert at that, for oddball reasons, and that's a trivial amount of work for me. The "smart enough" part, I'm more than smart enough for. What's not a trivial amount of work is figuring out how to integrate that into HA. I can guarantee that there is an uncountably infinite number of people like me, and very few people like you. You don't need to do…
1) You can basically do this today with Blueprints. There's also things like Pyscript [0]. 2) The Node-RED implementation in HA is phenomenal and kids can very easily use with a short introduction. 3) Again, already there. ESPHome is a first class citizen in HA. I feel like you've not read the HA docs [1,] or took the time to understand the architecture [2]. And, for someone who has more than enough self-proclaimed s…
(1) You are correct that I have not read the docs or discovered everything there is. I have had HA for a few weeks now. I am figuring stuff out. I am finding the learning curve to be steep.
(2) However, I don't think you understand the level of usability and integration I'm suggesting. For most users, "read the docs" or "there's a github repo somewhere" is no longer a sufficient answer. That worked fine for 1996-era Linux. In 2023, this needs to be integrated into the user interface, and you need discoverability and on-ramps. This means actually treating developers as customers. Take a walk through Micro:bit and MakeCode to understand what a smooth on-ramp looks like. Or the Scratch ecosystem.
This contrasts with the macho "for someone who has more than enough self-proclaimed skills, this should be a very understandable system" -- no, it is not a very understandable system for me. Say what you will about my skills, that means it will also not be an understandable system for most e.g. kids and families.
That said, if you're correct, a lot of this may just be a question of relatively surface user-interface stuff, configuration and providing good in-line documentation.
(3) Skills are not universal. A martial artist might be a great athlete, but unless you're Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, that doesn't make you a great basketball player. My skills do include (1) designing educational experiences for kids; and (2) many semesters of graduate-level coursework on control theory.
That's very different from being fluid at e.g. managing docker containers, which I know next to nothing about. My experience trying to add things to HA has not been positive. I spent a lot of time trying to add extensions which would show me a Zigbee connectivity map to debug some connectivity issues. None worked. I eventually found a page which told me this was already in the system *shrug*. I still don't know why the ones I installed didn't work, or where to get started debugging.
For me, that was harder than doing a root-locus plot, implementing a system identification, designing a lag or lead compensator, or running the Bode obstacle course.
Seriously. If I went into HA, and there was a Python console with clear documentation and examples, this would be built. That's my particular skills, but a userbase brings very diverse other skills.