I’ve been a relatively happy user of Home Assistant for many years now. I’ve gone through a number of iterations of deployments and usage, generally being very impressed by how much can be done by the community. I love it when we see new integration platforms and support for new devices!
That said, please, please, please stop removing the ability to configure Home Assistant through YAML configuration files. This was one of the major things that attracted me to the project to begin with – that my home automation configuration and state wasn’t locked away in opaque structures and that I was able to easily, clearly, and concisely interact with them. That I could easily save, backup, and restore them.
I’m not in any way against making UI configuration methods available. YAML is certainly not immediately accessible to all (though with some learning I think it isn’t that bad), and the community will only benefit from increased an user base. But this needn’t be to the detriment of users that prefer flat files!
Having flat file configuration allows a lot of good things; version control for your configs, easy integration with other pipelines for testing, easy ability to generate configuration from other sources, etc.
For example, recent upgrades removed YAML support from the AlarmDecoder integration. This took a very simple 50 line YAML file I had and forced nearly 200 click interactions in the UI to restore and re-create all my zones. What before was an easy to see list of zones, names, and types is now tucked away behind an awkward config flow.
Please maintain support for configuring Home Assistant through YAML files.