HA has gotten a lot better in the last year if you haven’t used it in a while. I honestly don’t feel it’s cumbersome. Gone are the days of needing to use YAML code.

Looks like Shelly. If so, if you set up home assistant and get Shelly added do you get all the features you want? I would think so.

Sync was only released within the last week to the public, it’s going to take a little more time to finish working out the bugs. I am excited for sync because it was my preferred Reddit app and I’m hopeful it’ll be as good here. As for the ads… I use adguard dns and I haven’t seen any ads yet… Hopefully that continues. I agree $20 is steep but I thought I read somewhere that was one time payment. Someone else will have to confirm.