Really annoying not being able to turn the lights on or off because something (doesn't matter what) is not cooperating on a software level.
I'd add to your advice and say "do as much as you can to keep the experience vanilla," which in this case means standard fixtures and bulbs, just replacing the switches. For the price of half of one Hue bulb, my whole fixture is smart now, and I can still use whatever bulb I want.
It's been a few years since I've tried, but in the past I went through so many bulbs that whine when dimming that I gave up and put in smart bulbs where I can conceivably hear the bulb. Which means I've got switches that don't work properly if the hub is down.
I love the Caseta otherwise. We use it for recessed cans and the whine is just not quite noticeable. But, e.g. over my bed it's very noticeable. Maybe newer models of Caseta solved something and the bulbs aren't the solution?
The dimmable room that is working "best" is the one where everything is Hue and controlled "together" but it has issues when the Internet is down. The push-button switch they no longer make works decently well even then (sometimes): https://meethue.co/products/philips-hue-tap/
This is why I dislike smart bulbs with dumb switches and similar bad combos. Smart home appliances shouldn't hide any features behind an app either. But every manufacturer has perverse incentives to push their apps.
Now everything is wifi or bluetooth and it sucks.
Five years ago I would have designed a new house entirely around these things; now it would be so old-fashioned it wouldn't look out of place in the 1950s.
The thing you never realize, is that for each extra communication protocol and endpoint you add, you need to then troubleshoot across all the permutations.
So, if you are only using a wire to connect to another wire, there is only one path that can fail, the wire between them. Electricians are good at troubleshooting that.
If you add a wifi access point, and a smart bulb router (or whatever the fuck it is) and then you add a wifi extender, when things fail, which path did it take when it failed, or when it worked? The permutations you need to troubleshoot are suddenly an N^4 problem. Get your graph theory textbooks out and study up on the traveling salesman problem.
That's why we have had electricians come by who cannot figure out why when we push the wifi light dimmer button in one bedroom, that the other bedroom lights turn off. It just started happening a few months back. It's absolutely maddening.
All these smart devices are awful. As a related aside, our Amazon Ring devices no longer allow you to connect to their wifi with the Amazon Ring app, and we have a bunch of cameras that are dead once the power goes off. Used to be you could just join their temp wifi connection, register the device on the home wifi, and go. They turned that off. Now, they all say you need to get the QR code, but we cannot find that on the devices, so they are bricked. I'm sure this is because probably someone found an open wifi Ring camera, added it using their phone when they walked by, and spied on the family. But, I don't really care, I just know cameras are sitting there unusable by me, until some hacker walks by and figures out how to register them. I won't be spending anymore money on Amazon cameras, but I'm sure Amazon would be happy to have me just buy new ones.
I have some TP-link press-switches (so no on-off, just press to invert state), and they work amazing.
They work when the network is down. And you can read the state. Even if you turn off the network, flip the state, and turn it back on, it works correctly.
I just bought a 2 plug smart plug and this was a major selling feature.
What happens if I'm standing there and I don't have a device on me? I just press the button like I would anyway.
The failure mode for a smart switch needs to be a "classic" switch. This applies equally to garage door openers, showers, door locks, and the rest of the smart devices.
Note: I'll give a bit of a pass to smart window blinds as a selling point is lack of strings and cables and the therefore look cleaner.
I've heard it said that sort of mechanical powered switch with Thread/Matter is much harder, except with these old existing ones in bridges with old Zigbee compatibility, and more's the pity. It still seems such a good idea to me, one less battery to waste/go bad at exactly the wrong time.
Amusingly enough the failed Best Buy product line still work great with Apple HomeKit (and manually) - even though they discontinued the cloud service and refunded all purchases as gift cards.
Also no mesh and network fiddling, just a bus wire.