Hi BMesh
I have advanced considerably since the posting… but not a single reply in here…then it is best to learn by hard work although slow and rather dissapointing…
At least I can tell you that the zwave integration of HA (i use the gudieline from Franck Nijhof about the Z-Wave JS to MQTT add-on) is far better and more advanced than that of Vera. Im thinking about gost nodes, unstabilities, nodes suddenly stop working due to strange network optimization beeing done in the nigh etc etc… I have not started to build the automations or to write scripts so that may pose challenges…
I do not think that the level of WIFI transmissions pose a practical problem but I have slightly changed my opinion on leaving ZWave as it seems that the implementation in Vera was the problem… but it is early days and I only have 15 devices in the network over a rather limited physical space
I am generaly very impressed with HA although the step to understand/using it is high. Questions 1-4 I am stil in the dark but number 5 is clarified… The ability to also integrate many kinds of my WIFI devices is outstanding and was absent in Vera…
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I started to put HA in a VM under Xem server but I could not get USB passthrough. It seems you need a pci card that then can be passed but that is not a viable solution for me due to lack of physical space in my NUC (A chinese x64 machine the same size as a Intel NUC).
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The second prefered choice was Proxmox which workes well and was easy to set up and I have both the Zwave USB and the ZigBee passed though the VM. Here is a good guide Installing Home Assistant OS using Proxmox
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Instalation on bare metal also works fine ofcourse but i will stick to Proxmox
Rgrds…