I definitely agree there are perfectly valid use cases for home automation.  I intend to keep my lodgings as unintelligent as possible for as long as I can.  I played with automation when it first came out: BSR X10 remote dimmers.  Very fun stuff, I love light dimmers.  At that time, and this was late '70s, early '80s or thereabouts, the problem I had was the control modules were VERY sensitive to power spikes and would pop at the least issue.  Now I just have a bedside halogen lamp with a rheostat. :-)  And that thing is probably 25-30 or more years old, come to think of it. In the last year I've replaced both my washer and dryer, and it was a bit of a challenge avoiding things that wanted to be connected to WiFi!  But I succeeded.  That's something that I definitely don't need.  And refrigerators connected to the internet?  I need to look inside and see if I'm low on milk?  Well, since I can't see inside a carton, that doesn't really tell me if the carton is nearly full or nearly empty, it just tells me if I have one or more cartons, which I would know when I had breakfast in the AM, in which case I knew then how much milk was in it. sigh