WTH does the new user onboarding experience for automations/routines suck?

Okay, first off: since I first looked at it a number of years ago, the onboarding experience for HA has improved massively. Gone are the days of huge amounts of work just to start integrating devices, which is a massive step forward. HA discovered my lights, my switches, and with a very small amount of effort I had everything populated, including some devices that I’ve been unable to integrate anywhere else. I touched a text editor maybe twice, and that was for the Nest integration.

Then I started thinking about doing some fairly simple automations. Things I wanted to move from Smartthings.

It appears my options are either:

  1. find an existing blueprint that already does exactly what I need (potentially without any knowledge that hundreds of blueprints exist online)
  2. start from scratch and immediately get blocked by not yet knowing the difference between a device and an entity and a service, or a value and a status

As it happens, I’m technically capable and option 2 was doable for me with a bit of research, but I’m not your average newbie.

Some more guided blueprints, or even guides to popular blueprints would massively reduce the hurdle for a novice coming from another platform.

@jymbob don’t forget to vote for your own WTH

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