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Comment by frantathefranta | Hacker News Reader

Their ethos is that Home Assistant should be deployed in a non-complicated way and that many things that "IT people" want to do with HA are not actually necessary. I can't find the source but I recall frenck (one of the lead devs) explaining that people ask him about stuff like setting up HA using Terraform and he just wonders why someone would want that.

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That the default should be non-complicated isn't necessarily in conflict with features for power users, and I feel like in the HA forums it often is portrayed as an unresolvable conflict, when it isn't.

I do think the maintainers are getting better about it. The releases over the past year have reworked a lot of things to be more intuitive for casual users while also being more flexible for power users, but there is still a lot of ground left to cover.

I think with the growing popularity, and expansion of fields of use, this is something they'll ultimately have to reckon with. I've seen quite a few posts on the the HA subreddit, where it's being used for controls in e.g. hotels or other bigger buildings, because it has a great feature set and prevents vendor lock-in. There is no harm in also catering to those people & organizations.

I'd guess that most of the Home Assistant user base is "IT people".

I don't see HA as a consumer established product, as much as Nabu Kasa would like otherwise.

Then again, this is just my guesswork. I have 0 clue the demographics of Home Assistant users

I'd like to prevent my children from viewing / modifying certain parts of the home. Is that so niche?

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