80% of my lights are smart bulbs rather than switches, and I agree with your take here. In my house I have the smarts in the switch itself wherever possible, but so much of my lighting is from floor and table lamps (that aren't plugged into switched outlets). In those cases, the bulb is the only thing I can "smarten", and it still will work via the stem on the lamp itself if the HA box goes away.
The main drawback is that this means I have to have the bulbs set to light up after power is restored. A middle-of-the-night power outage is fun when the entire house lights up at 3am :)
I've done a few new installs of lighting in my garage, driveway, and patio. Because that was "greenfield" work, I got to put smart switches in. If I ever rewire this house, I'll use that opportunity to do some more.
Have you looked at smart plugs? I have a few lamps in my home plugged into them and the automation works fine. I have a couple spares I store with the Xmas stuff so that the lights can be automated once the decorations are up.
I use Kasa (TP-Link) plugs but there are a bunch of different brands.
I have, yeah. A couple years ago I got a bunch of Tasmota-flashable ones, and I use them for the coffeemaker, a couple stereos, and one table lamp. Oh yeah, and the christmas lights. :)
My issue with those is that they fail the "normal person" test. A normal person will try to turn on a lamp and it will never work because the smart plug is off. But with a smart bulb, it'll come on after they twist the stem a couple times. (And it never gets noticed! People are used to 3-way style lamp sockets needing a couple clicks to turn regular bulbs on and off, so they don't really notice that they had to double twist the stem to get the light to turn on)
Of course, now you have the opposite problem: someone turns the bulb off with the lamp knob (unaware of/irritated with its smart features), and now it's unresponsive with all smart controls.
The best compromise are smart switches. Switch still manually controls the light, and smart features are always available. The downsides are that the lamp's outlet must have switch wiring, and smart switches aren't like normal toggles: they're more like push buttons so the switch isn't in a strange physical state.
Haha, yup. No matter what method I choose, I give something up. I agree switches are usually the best, but it gets more complicated when I want to have configurable color temp and dimmability in the same fixture. Can't use a dimmer switch, because the smart bulb wants full power. Or I can use a dimmer that's operating as basically a remote for the bulb rather than a true current-interrupting switch. But now it needs to be able to fall back to real switch mode if the hub is offline.
(By the way, Philips Warm Glow bulbs are awesome for this. I use them in my dining room lamp connected to an Inovelli Z-wave dimmer. They get warmer the dimmer they go, mimicking how tungsten filaments work)
My current setup is a mix-n-match of all three types, using each one where it beats the other two for simplicity and predictability.
The main drawback is that this means I have to have the bulbs set to light up after power is restored. A middle-of-the-night power outage is fun when the entire house lights up at 3am :)
I've done a few new installs of lighting in my garage, driveway, and patio. Because that was "greenfield" work, I got to put smart switches in. If I ever rewire this house, I'll use that opportunity to do some more.