Not only that, but Home Assistant is by far my favorite example of a well run "crowd run" open source project.

There's no big company bankrolling it (well there kinda is since ubiquiti hired the creator, but not to the same extent something like Chromium is just google), there are a HUGE number of committers, and the structure encourages people to maintain and improve their own contributions via 3rd party packages.

There's no fighting, there's not much gatekeeping, it's not overly complicated, and they are EXTREMELY welcoming to new contributions, no matter how "unique" the use case is (look at some of the integrations! There's integrations for local bus schedule systems!). And on top of that, there's world-class documentation! That's rare enough in paid products, but to see it from a project like this, and the fact that it's almost always up to date is simply amazing.

They held my hand through creating 2 new integrations, and I haven't developed in python for almost 10 years, and they were extremely helpful, responsive, and at the end of the day the product got better for everyone.

I really don't have enough good things to say about Home Assistant.

I really wanted to love this project, but it had all sorts of odd problems with finding devices reliably. Had another weird issue where the "delay" had to be hacked in the config to recognize dimming properly.

I tried out HomeSeer and it has worked flawlessly. The downside is it is written in VB Script, yes you read that right so its nearly impossible to extend with your own plugins.

I really wish this project worked as reliably as HomeSeer so I can actually contribute and extend it. Maybe thats changed in the last year ?