I went with zigbee simply because there seems to be a ton of devices available, and while many vendors try to build devices that don't adhere to default message

I went with zigbee simply because there seems to be a ton of devices available, and while many vendors try to build devices that don't adhere to default messages so you'd have to use their gateways that talk to the cloud, zigbee is simple enough to reverse engineer the communication and add support in all the open source ha solutions.