I’ve been running Home Assistant for a few years now with all my Ikea lights connected via the Ikea hub and integration. All my bulbs in rooms were locally bound to an Ikea 5 button remote’s which could control state, brightness and colour. Other than the fact that the Ikea hub occasionally required a reboot for no apparent reason, this worked fine.
Then the Ikea integration broke, and after a while it seemed it would not return, so I decided it was time to finally bite the bullet and switch to the Zigbee in my HA yellow. I decided to use ZHA since I reasoned it was part of the HA core, so hopefully would be more stable.
I have my system mostly setup, however I am having a few issues and wondered if anyone had any advice. To clarify, none of these issues existed with the same hardware when using the Ikea integration.
My issues are all concerned with local binding, which I prefer so if (when) my HA falls over after dark I can fix it without a torch 
.
Setting up local bindings was a pain, it often took multiple attempts to bind a bulb to a remote, and I still have a few bulbs that refuse to bind, is there a better way to do this? or a way to get more information on what is happening behind the UI?
The Ikea 5 button remotes will change the state and brightness of the bound bulbs, but not the colour, is there a way I can fix this?
I also have the strange issue where the main bulb in my living room has bound to a remote and this can be used to turn it on/off. However the state of the bulb when it is controlled in this way is not reflected in the HA dashboard. However I can turn it on and off from the HA dashboard, so HA knows about the bulb.
Is there any behind the scenes method (command line tool or config file) I can use to setup local bindings? I did wonder if Zigbee groups would help, but these did not seem to do anything and the interface was confusing, is this documented anywhere?
Finally have chosen the wrong system, and would Zigbee2MQTT be a better solution? or just give me a new set of headaches?
Sorry for the long post, but it is annoying to be forced to change from a working system to one which does not work as well. (I never expected to be looking back longingly at the Ikea Integration)