Zwave is irritating to migrate, in theory the configuration is stored on the stick/radio but in reality it only stores some basic info and the pairing keys. You end up needing to re-interview everything for Home Assistant to know what it’s talking to. Last time I had to do it I ended up just resetting and repairing everything from scratch. I think the secure pairings in the newer Zwave revisions also has some quirks to migrate.

In my experience the biggest hurdle to Zigbee devices is figuring out how to get them into pairing mode or proximity when pairing. Most of my headaches have been with it being unclear how to get them into pairing mode (Phillips bulbs are finnicky to pair unless you have a Hue remote, which will reset devices near it by holding the On+Off buttons down near the device you want to reset), or with devices wanting to be paired in close physical proximity to the root coordinator. For the latter, some devices seem to only want to pair if you’re within a few meters of the Zigbee base, whereas others are perfectly happy to pair to whatever the nearest coordinator it can talk to. Xiaomi and Samsung devices seemed to be the main offenders for that one.

It’s a lot smoother nowadays though, as Zigbee has become a lot more standardized. It’s been a while since I had any new Zigbee devices give me trouble setting up.

There is no truly all-in-one Home Assistant device off the shelf, but the HA devs have two reference kits that are mostly ready-to-go: Home Assistant Yellow and Green. There’s not a ton of difference between them at a high level, other than that Yellow includes a Zigbee radio onboard while Green does not. You can easily add other radios via USB dongles for Zwave (and/or Zigbee in the case of the Green) as needed. Both the Green and Yellow are supported directly by the Home Assistant devs and have lots of documentation. Home Assistant itself can easily replace SmartThings in terms of functionality, and in fact greatly exceeds it. Most of the headache is just gonna be migrating your stuff from ST to HA and the associated learning curve, which there is unfortunately just not an easy way to do AFAIK other than manually porting everything from ST->HA.

If you want a standalone hub with its own ecosystem most similar to SmartThings that you can later also integrate with Home Assistant, maybe the Xiaomi hub is the best option. However, it’s Zigbee only and mostly only works with their devices. You’d be better off just moving everything to Home Assistant up front IMO.

I’m willing to believe someone could have voted for Trump the first time in good faith. Voting for him again after seeing the shitshow of his first term, however…