All excellent points I didn't think of and probably wouldn't have. Thank you. I will gravitate towards switches then, maybes a few will go on sale for Black Friday.
I know your setup is different from what I am doing, but you seem very very knowledgeable about home automation so do you mind if I ask a few more things?
First of all: does it matter if I get zigbee or zwave? Mix and match?
I mix and match. I try to find the best product for the job, regardless of Z-wave or Zigbee. I have more Zigbee devices right now, mainly because I've bought a ton of the excellent Lowes Iris (second gen - first gen won't work) stuff. Monoprice has some Zwave stuff that works well too, but their selection seems to be decreasing (for example, they don't carry z-wave relays any more and all 3 of mine were purchased from Monoprice).
Secondly: Are there brands to avoid? Or device categories that just don't work?
Your best bet is to use the SmartThings Community (
http://community.smartthings.com) as a reference for whenever you find a device you might be interested in. I tend to buy HA products whenever they go on sale and I'll always double check in the community to ensure they work.
Most people say to avoid the GE Link bulbs. I personally haven't had issues with them but many have, so I'd go with Cree or Osram.
Finally: Do you use voice commands for a thermostat or a Harmony setup? Thermostat is where I wanted to go next. That is one thing that makes me sad about Google Home, means I pretty much have to go Nest instead of the apparently superior Ecobee or I have to deal with IFTTT which from my research basically translates to "unreliable hacks." Would love your opinion.
I ordered an Ecobee yesterday (Amazon had it for $199 plus my utility gives a $100 rebate), so I can't comment on that yet. Echo directly integrates with Ecobee and there is a paid third-party app for SmartThings which is supposed to be excellent. I'm not quite sure if I am going to integrate it with ST or not at this stage, but I'm open to it. I previously used IFTTT for controlling my Harmony stuff and it could be very unreliable - sometimes response was nearly instantaneous, other times you would wait minutes, and still other times, nothing would ever happen.
I have 3 Harmony hubs and they're tied into SmartThings and therefore, Echo. It is nice because if I issue a voice command (for example, "Alexa, turn Plex on"), Harmony turns everything on that I need and also the remote application on my phone or tablet automatically flips to that activity so it is ready to go. Echo does tie directly into Harmony as well but it has some pretty severe limitations - the chief being that it can only see one hub at a time.
While Harmony integration with ST is cool, there are some limitations. For example, everything is activity driven - so if you want to say "Alexa, turn the channel to channel 4" or something like that, you have to have a specific activity for turning to channel 4. Ditto for volume controls (admittedly, not as bad as the channel scenario I mentioned), etc. I am hoping Logitech does some redesign work on their software so that maybe you'll be able to at least directly turn to favorites ("Alexa, tell Harmony to turn to CNN" or something) rather than having to make activities for each channel. I wouldn't think it would be terribly hard to do and I'm surprised they haven't done it yet.