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> It did always feel a bit awkward having Zigbee networking and IP networking competing over the same site

Funny, to me that's a feature. It makes the threat of a hacked device that exfiltrate data from within your network much less likely. I avoid any wifi device because of that.

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This. The network fragmentation is the point, just like how some businesses would run IPX internally and use a proxy for web/IP traffic to protect corporate infrastructure from malicious devices or software.

Not everything has to be on TCP/IP. For smart home connectivity, I’d say that’s a feature, provided said networking standard is just as open as TCP/IP.

> just like how some businesses would run IPX internally

when? In the 1990s?

As late as the early 2000s! I was still setting up IPX for some older DOS/Win95 games to play over the LAN as recently as 2008, and my Novell class (last one offered at my college, around 2007) cited several large local companies who were still employing that technique as a “security through obscurity” thing, though the professor was mainly just citing use cases for IPX rather than promoting new implementations of it.

Yes, not to mention WiFi is so much more power hungry.

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