This is not strictly true. Mr. Cool has a 2-Ton heat pump (Designed to work with existing ducting) that can operate off of a normal non-communicating thermosta

This is not strictly true. Mr. Cool has a 2-Ton heat pump (Designed to work with existing ducting) that can operate off of a normal non-communicating thermostat. It still hits 19 SEER and does a lot of that optimization on the controller side. And when it comes to mini splits there are lots of them that will work with a normal thermostat. I know this, well, because I’ve spent many countless hours trying to find something that will work with Z-Wave and not a proprietary communicating system. Granted it might be less efficient but efficiency is way less important than having the ability to do that. The only exception I would consider is if the communicating thermostat was fully open and had a decent API that worked without Internet access.