I’d be designing the home more around the ability to remove and install new hardware and connections easily, so if something breaks, it’s not a heck of a project to remove and replace it if needed.
There’s a wool-based insulator starting to be used for walls that is so much more temperature, sound and water resistant that in the same thickness as a normal wall, you can have this padded insulation in there, and then a “fake” panelled outer shell on each side of it for running all your cabling without having to dig it through insulation. The default installations with this stuff is to have the “shell” wall to be all removable panels, secure enough to hang photos etc on, but easy enough to pull of that everything low-voltage becomes an almost-diy tool less job. I’ll try find more info on it for you if you like, it was a while ago that I was reading up on it properly.
But that’s the sort of thing I’d look for in “future proofing” your home. Infrastructure things that make any tinkering you end up having to do as time goes on be as effortless as possible, and that also makes it as easy and approachable for if you’re no longer around and family members need to contract someone in to come in, understand what’s there, and fix it.
Even if you plan to go wireless for everything, it would be worth putting in some good backbone Ethernet through everywhere. The worst thing about wifi (and Bluetooth) is when you have competing networks and devices all basically shouting each other’s signal into obscurity. Just being in range of each other causes signal loss, and the obvious answer for the last 10 years to “my wifi signal is poor” is to pour more energy into it. Drown out the competing signals by making your signal stronger.
And of course then the neighbour buys a more powerful router to do the same thing, and it just continues to go from there. I live on the 13th floor of my apartment building and there are over 50 networks whose RSSI is between -50 and -100, some of which are from the ground floor. There are several that have stronger signals from other apartments than my own routers that are only meters away, because their TX power is just set stupidly high as a easy way around the busy spectrum issue. And I’ve checked, none of those are from direct neighbours 
With thorough Ethernet infrastructure, you can just put a bunch of mid-strength wifi routers around your home, so none of your devices are ever very far from a access point, and it completely deals with this situation, and you wont have to troubleshoot interference issues. With the correct setup of the routers, they will just seamlessly pass client connections around based on bandwidth needs and as devices move around the house. You’ll never get hit with the client limit of any of the routers as you add in wifi smart devices all over the place, and you should have some great latency gains.
If you chuck in a pile of cat6/6a, really you shouldn’t need to change it for a long time. It support 10GBs if you upgrade the end points to support it, and you can package just about any sort of signal over Ethernet as needed. A4K 60fps HDR HDMI video connection can be funnelled over a 1GBs Ethernet line, so from a practical sense you should be able to get away with that as your wiring from a bandwidth point of view for a very long time. At most, you might find one or two particularly use cases need direct fibre lines in the future, so you drag fibre for them specifically, but what could we need in every room that would take that kind of bandwidth, right?
(I’m totally gonna be eating my words when we get holograms telemeetings a la Mass Effect and we want them to be taken anywhere in the house )
For my really infrastructure sort of things, like light switches, ventilation, plumbing control etc, the stuff that really has to work, no matter what, I’m keeping as much of it wired as possible. If it absolutely has to be wireless, I use something in a quiet piece of spectrum, like z-wave or 433 (through now that’s starting to get busier too, seems to be what anything that used to be IR is going to for remotes).
To address “dependable” specifically through, the most important thing I can think of is whenever you’re taking something “dumb” and making it “smart”, “remote controllable”, or “automatable”, the non-negotiable thing really needs to be that you can still use it the “dumb” way totally normally, no questions asked. And fully interchangeably between “smart” and “dumb”.
A light for example: if you get a smart bulb, you can’t use the switch anymore, since you have to keep the switch on for the bulb to be powered and controllable. If the bulb is off and you flip the switch, it stays off cause now it has no power. If you flip the switch again, it will either now turn on, or will remember it’s last “smart” command was to be off, so it stays off.
So for every device you install, ask “If someone doesn’t know it’s smart-enabled, and use it the ‘classical’ way, will that a) work as they would expect every time, and b) mess with the smarts/automations set up with it in a way that will require someone correcting it?”
That will lead you to the most dependable solutions in general. Worked well so far for my aircon, light switches, the cooling for my AV/consoles, smart lock and laundry/bathroom ventilation.
We talk about smart home and automation as “making life easier”, but often forget that we have years of muscle memory of how all these things work, so making sure that work like they used to is just as important as making them work smarter for us
this is getting rather silly. Any wireless transmission/reception can be “jammed”. Jeez if someone wants to circumvent a system , with determination , then they will.
good to know.
