For myself HA has been the best thing since, like, forever. I personally love it, if not obvious.
The hardware part is still complicated because of this pull-down stuff and just a mix of randomness as everyone is developing all kinds of things to do "stuff". HA ties it together enough to be useful and more. Just this morning I was thinking it's really cool I can try to correlate my waking with CO2/humidity levels and what happens when the furnace runs? For the curious, having furnace run helps everything
With each iteration and replacement I’m discovering there’s more out there.
For example instead of using a random computer or pi, installing a home assistant yellow presents to a future home owner as more of an appliance.
https://www.home-assistant.io/yellow/
This is a nice gateway for non technical but “I can find someone to help me with this system”.
Same goes for particular groups of hardware.
You’re night it’s a mix but the fact you can run most things on one platform fairly easily is pretty useful.