I'm going down a similar path, although I have been doing it differently from the beginning. My home is still predominantly Z-Wave, but I never got on the hidd

I'm going down a similar path, although I have been doing it differently from the beginning. My home is still predominantly Z-Wave, but I never got on the hidden-relay bandwagon for lights. All of my lights which are on the Z-Wave network are wall switches, so they work as dumb switches if the controller is down. Number 1 rule, do not ever rely on the controller for basic on/off operation. But I agree with his points about maintaining the network. It's a pain to add new devices. I bought a bunch of new switches, and they're all Kasa WiFi switches. Easier to set up, more responsive than Z-Wave, and a lot cheaper. Perhaps the one downside is that a WiFi device by definition has one less (really big) hurdle to become Internet-connected. So I did have to be careful with my WiFi configuration and firewall rules. But I'll take that trade-off. The experience has been far superior.