What I want most, specifically, is a bedside pistol safe, the size of a "gun vault", which is actually secure, but still rapid-access.
(The problems with the "gun vault" style safes are numerous -- some of them can be simply dropped 6" and they pop open from inertia on the locking mechanism. Others can be defeated surreptitiously by peeling off a sticker and inserting a paperclip to hit the reset button inside. They're not suitable for leaving a loaded firearm inside when you have untrustworthy people about for extended periods. The only reasonable model right now is to take a carry gun and put it in the safe every night (which is great IFF you carry every day), or to transfer a weapon from a "real" safe to the bedside vault every night. The problem is at some point you might forget, and both false-positive and false-negative kind of suck there.)
The tradeoff I'm willing to make is spending $1k for this vs. $100, and accepting two distinct entry modes: an slow-path "unattended/unprimed" mode which uses a UL group II electronic lock for access, with timeout-access, and a fast-path "day gate" (which would actually be night gate...) which opens quickly using (ideally) a chording keyboard mechanism, or biometric, or something else.
What I absolutely want to defend against is surreptitious entry when unattended -- i.e. for someone with kids, capable of entering hundreds or thousands of combinations in a week, there should be very low risk of users brute forcing the combo or otherwise gaining access in a way which doesn't leave evidence/alarm. Ideally, tamper events would lock the safe down to full TL-15 mode; if your kids can defeat a TL-15 safe, particularly surreptitiously when it is monitored every day, they might deserve the firearm for their new life of crime.
I'd be willing to have no override capability on the fast-path -- if it misreads, or is at all suspicious, if fails back to the slow-path. The mechanism for enabling fast-path might be unrelated to the slow-path entry mechanism (i.e. you don't need to open the door); what I was thinking of was some kind of presence-detect using bluetooth watch (Apple Watch) challenge-response, or something like that.
I could accomplish this today by buying an actual UL TL-15 safe of some size and putting a gunvault inside it, but that takes up a lot of space, and would weigh half a ton. There has to be a better solution.
I'd also like to have it tied into my alarm system and notifications -- if someone attempts to enter the safe, I want a notification on my phone. I'd also like to be able to force slow-path-only remotely. (I'd also like to have lighting, cameras, etc. controlled by alarm events, but that's a separate thing; I'd prefer NOT to have my bedroom recorded on video normally, but when the gun safe is opened, I'd like video logs to be streamed offsite in realtime.)