WTH are attributes such a pain to work with

[rct]

@petro

Pretty sure @pnbruckner did this with Sun2 and it has more options in regards to timing.

Good/interesting point:

• @pnbruckner’s Sun2 integration is very useful and was one of the first custom integrations I installed at least 2 years ago.
• The Sun2 integration is fairly old and could stand to be upgraded to take advantage of some of the modern elements of Home Assistant. For example, Sun2 adds a bunch of entities that don’t have any info available through the UI about what integration they belong to. i.e. Where did sensor.daylight come from?
• Sun2 entities don’t have any consistent naming that can be used to search to see what might be related.
• Since sun2 is a custom integration, there is no data on how many people use it in Integrations | Home Assistant Analytics
• It would be nice to see some features of Sun2 make it into the sun integration so less people need to install a custom integration. (Of course data could help drive that decision.)
• A number of the Sun2 entities actually make extensive use of attributes. For example sensor.daylight:

@petro

There are still uses for attributes in many places and they won’t be going away in those places. Like brightness for a light, or set point temperature on climate, etc.

Actually the climate set point (to me) is a great example of an attribute that should be an entity. It is first data that to relate to and use in automation. When did it last change? How long did it take for the observed temperature to catch up? What’s the difference between specific rooms and the set point for the HVAC system.

WTH don't climate devices make it easier to track usage?

Paulus said, Most of your energy usage goes into heating your house in the winter. Whether it is heating or cooling, energy can be one of the more significant portions of many people’s monthly costs. So why don’t climate entities make it easier to track usage information that can make it easier to manage energy costs? You shouldn’t have to have real time energy consumption monitoring to use the energy dashboard and measure your usage. To be able to measure and understand your usage, It is us…

So back to the topic at hand. Attributes are probably going to be around for a while. I have a lot of template sensors (many in legacy format that need to be converted so they can be used It in statistics. It would be help the UX if there were some tools to make the usage easier. I think there are some other WTHs that are related:

• New Helper: Entity from attribute (as mentioned by OP)
  • ideally would also make it easier to enable statistics tracking as appropriate for attributes
• WTH can’t template entities be made in UI - #8 by foxy82
• Why can't we add template entities to existing devices? - #7 by samuelthng

If there are going to be breaking changes (attributes → entities) then it would be good to have some assistance to deal with refactoring and merging history.

• WTH is there no "refactor" functionality when changing an entity name? - #18 by scr

Also if the number entities is going to be increasing as attributes start to become somewhat deprecated:

• WTH can we not include and exclude entities for the recorder using the UI - #5 by irresisti
• WTH can't we specify the purge_keep_days in Recorder per entity? - #4 by nicohirsch
• WTH is my database size so huge - #11 by KevinCathcart
• WTH we still cannot merge/add entities into devices manually?

Not sure if this helps, but I think it helps to take a little bit of a broader look at the implications of Home Assistant as a home data platform. I think these things will become more important over time as Home Assistant is used for managing costs, energy being the largest, and doing more to protect property (spot things that need attention because they are out of bounds, don’t follow trends, etc.)