Home Assistant should really maintain a list of actively hostile (and actively cooperative) manufacturers to make it easier to decide what to purchase.
One reason this is tricky to do is because up until let's say the last 6 months or so, myQ _wasn't_ hostile, even if it was Cloud-based. (I get that that aligns with your point! I'm not arguing with you there.)
But in general, OK - some things are better done via an on-line service. But it's the minority of cases - almost none of IoT devices have a legitimate reason to route control and diagnostics through the cloud.
What matters is that they provide proper documentation for their APIs, encourage devs to use them, and don't have a history of breaking old clients with new firmware updates (without very good security reasons).
The company could go out of business and shut down their servers. Or shut down the servers because they're no longer selling the product.
Sometimes incompetence is as bad or worse than malice. The company could break an API accidentally. Or the API only works intermittently. Or they could add poorly-implemented rate limiting that unintentionally affects multiple users when they share an IP via NAT.
The obvious way to implement this would be to have a front-and-center filter for cloud/local, so that one could use it to check which brands to consider before buying new connected hardware. It's a use case people have been asking for years. It's the only reason one would want to access a searchable list through their own page (as opposed to googling "${brand name} home assistant").
What's the blocker here?
It's an open source project. Stuff generally gets worked on by people who care about features. You seem to care about this. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.io
any takers?