Thanks Tamsy for that info, I’ve taken a quick look at Local Tuya.
To be honest, me being a noob (never used SAMBA (can’t even dance lol) and never written any yaml etc.), it might be a bit technically challenging for me to implement it. 
I’ll have to do more research when I’ve got more time, but the way I’m feeling at the moment - the Pi is very close to going on Ebay and biting the bullet and buying an IFTTT subscription.
Local Tuya is the way to resolve this… worth the effort
Same errors as everybody with core-2021.7.3 docker
On/off the lights takes 5 to 20secs.
Sensors never updated, couldn’t change colors.
Sorry but official tuya integration is still totally unusable and unreliable to use for normal operation or automation.
Fixed with localtuya, now everything works super fast.
Once you setup localtuya integration it’s not that hard to add all your devices.