I've got an ecobee and I've been really happy with it. I couldn't care less how it looks as it's installed in the wiring closet and the remote sensors are the only thing we ever see. The remote sensors are also great if you house doesn't heat up evenly. My "morning" mode only take the bedroom sensor into account, while the other times of day average all the sensors that have detected motion recently.
Oh...you must tell me all about this. It's a HUGE issue in our house, where the basement can be 66 when the master bedroom is 78. How much control do you have over what is the primary sensor and when things switch around?
For example, I'd be perfectly happy if the actual thermostat was NEVER used in determining the temperature of the house. It's in the least-used room of our home, there's never anyone in it, and the conditions in that room are unique to the house. It's the reason that the occupancy sensing feature of our Nest has been turned off since day one.
I'm intrigued by the slowness you describe with zwave. Mine always seem quite responsive, though I don't have complicated scenes with lots of devices. I'm wondering if your controller was more of an issue than zwave?
Your guess is as good as mine. My speed issues with ZWave were five years old and persisted through 5 different controllers in two locations of the house, and through the swapping of almost every light switch. Half of the light switches in my house have now been swapped out THREE TIMES since I moved in 5 years ago. From toggle switch to Intermatic ZWave to Linear ZWave to Lutron Caseta.
I've used USB controllers that allowed me to see network maps of my devices, showing no more than two hops between any of them, and most of them were one hop. Heck, I had a dozen devices within 10 feet of my controllers at any time, and yet everything was still excruciatingly slow. I even upgraded from an analog baby monitor to a digital one, to minimize the interference on the ZWave frequency.
The only devices that stayed the same throughout my ZWave time were the lamp dimmer modules. I'm not saying those couldn't be the culprit, but they were well made GE modules and they were the only ones that had worked well for me when I first started using ZWave products around 7 years ago in my old condo.
Who knows, maybe if I'd removed all my ZWave stuff and completely replaced it with new ZWave stuff, it would have performed just as good as my HomeKit network or better. I don't know. But I LOVE the Home app, despite its flaws. I can't express how easy it is to make changes to my system on the fly. I've tried 5 different controllers with at least 7 different interfaces, and the Home app is darn close to exactly what I've always wanted out of a home automation controller UI.
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