Procedural or State

I love home assistant.
I have been using it for the last half-year, and have a lot of automation.
I have come to the next understanding and would like to hear your opinions, and thoughts may be for future developments.
The current way of configuring automation is by rules of what to do when. What I actually want is to define what state I want when.
For instance, I want my garden lights on at night only when we are home. So I need to define a lot of rules to covert all the transitions between states. Instead I would like to define the end state based on conditions and then just trigger when to configure the lights by the wanted state.