Sunrise/Sunset Lights on/off automations only works fully one way

Eh. Scenes aren’t that great and will not solve your issue if it is a communication problem. Scenes are just like scripts (or automation actions) except that you don’t have to specify the action, just the entity and the state you want. The scene will work out the action for you. However they are very limited in that they only support entity states. They don’t support other actions like delays and conditional statements.

Creating a zigbee light group (not a HA light group) may reduce the amount of traffic on your zigbee network and make the action more reliable.

Either way, I would look at the health of your zigbee network as the probable casue of the issue. See: Zigbee network optimization: a how-to guide for avoiding radio frequency interference + adding Zigbee Router devices (repeaters/extenders) to get a stable Zigbee network mesh with best possible range and coverage by fully utilizing Zigbee mesh networking