what is your current system ?
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I came from homeseer when they were switching to 4.0. I have z-wave, shelly, sonoff, ecobee, rainmachine, powerwall, MyQ and a bunch of other sensors and devices. HA just works.
The upkeep is moderate. Keeping up to date with all the monthly changes can be daunting at times. That said, you can set aside a Saturday and just do all updates once a month.
Z-Wave support is excellent. Shelly and Sonoff are both easily supported. I can’t speak to ZigBee because I don’t have any ZigBee devices. I do not use node red or mqtt. I do have my alarm system tied into HA with envisalink. The system is limited only by your imagination.
Still working for you ???
No, I had to go to ratgdo. It now works better than ever and I am glad to be rid of the MyQ API problem.
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I don’t mind tinkering on my system but I “manage” 3 others that need to just work. Can’t say for sure if they’ll be switching too but it’s possible.
I find it refreshing that there isn’t much ‘negative’ about HA on here, been combing through for a few days, but I also find it hard to believe that there isn’t much ‘negative’ on here! 
I’ll admit it’s come a long way since I tried it in the beginning, good to see that.
How about a custom “front end”? Anyone working on something like that? I have people that use touchscreens and I made a “windows Media Center” style screens, since they used to use WMC, and they like it and are older so changing that could get ugly for me… it really is hard to teach an old dog new tricks regardless of what they say!
Hey man, I don’t want to go into massive details and will come straight to the point. I manage three instances and I found it incredibly important to build “warning automations” and a status dashboard. Each instance has a few key automations to send a notification when something significant doesn’t work. That could be a device offline for more than 24 hours, a temperature below safe levels, battery devices below 20% etc. This is combined with respective overview lovelace dashboard for status info.
Yes, a connection might get lost, a device might go offline, or a software change might break something in your config - But warning automations will keep you informed about the relevant stuff and you can go in for a more thorough maintenance run every couple of months.
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You’ve arrived at just the right moment…
Is it a “tinker-er” system? … yes
Is it a canned “one-size-fits-all” system … yes
The key is it is either. You make it what you want.
I ignore most of the you can drag/drop here/there etc.
I design my screens to be right for the person/platform they are using.
And I can.
it might be great, it could be great … most things Home Assistant are.
Review the comments in the release posts (for example, the last four months). That should provide a realistic introduction.
Well, in that sense I suppose all HA dashboards are custom - nothing is pre-configured; you create as many or as few as you like, with as many elements as you need:
The buttons in your example (Lighting, Access, etc) correspond to the narrow toolbar on the left - you can have text or icons there - each one bringing up another dashboard.
The issue for many users is that building dashboards has always been a bit clunky - HA was originally designed as “mobile first”, so creating larger displays involves setting up grids and then fitting cards and buttons into them. The new development promises to make all thet much easier.
Ugly Truth? Things to beware of:
Poor or sub-par/out-dated documentation makes config of your new system challenging, particularly if you use MQTT or Energy monitoring
Beware of useless updates - I only update when I see issues that affect my setup/hardware. I find updates often “bump” back ends for software I don’t care about or for hardware I don’t have (Husqvarna Automower integration?). The rewards for being on the upgrade-train are ZERO and the risk to breaking your working setup is significant. You will find updates eventually “break” working setups because someone thinks its a great idea to change things i.e. latest 2024.3.0 update breaks/changes MQTT and Z-Wave climate entities a.k.a. “lets put the car steering wheel in the back seat and we’ll now call the gear shift the Intrasprocket, and you can’t make left turns anymore”. I think I will wait until the 2024.3.1 patches to come out because I don’t want to waste hours of my time trying to figure out WTF why doesn’t XYZ work anymore.
Personally I’ve gone to a VM based HAOS because I’m tired of screwing around with Raspberry Pi “flakiness”. On the minus side is greater power consumption and having to deal with a host OS capable of running VM.
Finally, beware of HA fan boys who think everything needs to be like a Cell Phone App because they don’t have a life outside of wasting time tweaking a home automation system to accommodate updates and posting on the internet about Tesla and Apple iPhones.
I personally want and expect to have a reliable home automation system. If I need a hammer I buy a hammer and don’t want a 50-in-1 screwdriver with bluetooth requiring always on internet to work and a built in social media tracker.
I am far less technical than many others in this forum. I previously used UD’s Eisy which has a superb customer service and I relied many times for them to resolve technical issues. While Eisy works with ZWave and Zigbee, it is primarily focused on Insteon.
Some time ago I discovered HA and gradually brought everything over from Eisy.
My fear was that basically HA has zero customer support and this forum, while very useful, is less responsive than the UD forum. However having used HA for about a year I am happy that I never needed customer support. When I do have problem then these have always been resolved with either a HA restart or a power cycle of the HA Yellow Box.
As a not very techie person, I am sure that I don’t use all features and possibilities of HA, even though I have more than 150 Automations and Scripts. YAML is largely beyond my technical level, and try to avoid it whenever possible.
But even without making optimum use of HA’s features, I am very satisfied with my setup that includes all lights, curtains and ceiling fans in our home. I make extensive use of the Google Calendar Integration as well as of Google Cast (playing music throughout the home).
Contrary to others, I always install updates but make sure to get a backup before. In fact I have set up a daily backup with a copy in HA and another copy in my Google Drive (using that specific Integration). I also make manual backup when I make a significant change or add a new device.
Is that the ugly truth?
If the default lovelace isn’t what you are seeking for you might find plenty of custom (cards) of your choice in hacs which probably will fit your needs, e.g.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone updates documentation anymore. Really a bad move but it always gets overlooked.
Updates… yup, I agree. Unfortunately that’s what the masses want these days. I still believe in “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. I get security updates, don’t get me wrong there, but I know people who won’t use an app on their phone anymore because it doesn’t get updated enough.
“Well what do you want it to do that it doesn’t?”
“Nothing, it just doesn’t get updated enough.”
Okay then.
Ha! we have comedians here too!!
Guess you never used WMC? It was pretty big back in the day. Some people still try to keep it alive. But to each his own. You think that’s ugly, I think a bunch of cards on a screen are ugly. Oh well.
I guess the important thing is the automation engine itself, but when you want the “remote control” aspect, scrolling through cards is retarded to me. I’d rather have an actual interface that can be navigated. But todays “thing” is dashboards. I don’t get it but that’s the way most are heading.
Documentation is an issue, but considering the sprawling nature of HA and the number of people contributing I think it’s remarkably good. The main issue for me has always been finding what I want. The new search box introduced recently has improved things, but still general concepts tend to get crowded out by pages and pages of stuff about vendor-specific integrations I’ve never heard of. Still, the whole point of HA is to integrate all these things. If you admit your ignorance and start from the top, there is a fairly clear path for newcomers to follow.
True, the bulk of each update always consists of stuff I don’t use and am not interested in, but I update every month anyway and I’ve never had a problem. Again, the point of the thing is integration, so the risks of not updating have always seemed greater. I always update at the end of the month, though, after all the corrections.
Not really. I suspect this is a result of not updating. So far the “breaking changes” list in the update post has always given me fair warning.
Again, not my experience. A good power supply, a SSD and all USB sticks in a powered hub and it’s been rock solid for several years
What? I don’t know what you mean. 
I find you need to keep up with updates or else you will end up having to go through rather a lot of breaking changes. If you have not updated for 6 months chances are you system will throw some difficult errors when trying to restart.
I have not in the 2 years of running HA ever had an instance where HA does not restart. I have had issues where it will not allow a restart due to config problems, but it tells you about this rather than letting you restart. If you then do a hard restart expect to have issues.
Documentation is fine, the issue is users start with YouTube, then search the forums where as they should start with the documentation. YouTube and the forums have guides dating back years, they are sometimes way out of date. I came across someone the other day trying to follow a 2 year old YouTube vid to setup something there was now an integration for. He had spent 5 days trying to get it running, took 3 minutes using the integration. If he had searched the docs he would have found the answer as quickly as I did.
The issues are more to do with users than developers in my experience. Yes things do go wrong but not often and not in a way that disables your system.
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So are you saying HA tells you about the config error without having to do the “Check Config” option? Haven’t had an instance where this mattered yet but it would be good if you didn’t have to rely on remembering to check it before a restart.
Yep just click restart and it runs the config check for you, try it 