I’m working on the same issue here. I’m guessing you have seen these threads:
I am interested in knowing the state of sensors as well as the arming status. I have it mostly working using the info from the threads above. However as you say it is slow. Zwave is almost instantaneous and the simple integration between the alarm and zwave sides of my 2gig panel seems like an opportunity to leverage these existing sensors.
The Zwave standard contains the ability to have a controller that acts in bridge mode. I think the original concept was to allow zwave to control say x10 devices.
One of the integrations available on hass.io is a zwave to mqtt bridge. This may be the way to get it going but I’m new to pretty much all of this. I’m still trying to get the integration working so I can do some playing but I’m not seeing anywhere in the instructions how to set up a virtual zwave device on the bridge so that a request to turn on that virtual zwave node can be published as an mqtt message and fullfilled and answered by an mqtt device. I’m thinking that it only works the other direction.
Let me know if you’ve figured anything out. I’ll post something here if I get the bridge to work.
Mark