Thanks Mike.
As Mike said above, bad repeaters are bad repeaters. Phillips Hue bulbs are fine repeaters. Other 3rd party ZLL bulbs are bad repeaters.
As a blanket statement, it's a good idea to separate your ZLL bulbs, if you can or want to. But if you have high quality bulbs that make good repeaters, its perfectly fine to have them in a ZHA mesh.
Choice is good, strong mesh is even better.
The other main reason we typically recommend bulbs on their own, is people tend to put bulbs in things that can be switched off, unplugged, etc. A zigbee repeater that drops off routinely can cause excessive battery drain in devices (they go into panic mode, high power and try to find another neighbor to join) and obvious packet loss until the mesh heals.
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I have learned a bunch following this discussion, but dome recent comments have me confused. I was tracking until the impact of light bulbs being turned off was brought up. It seems like using Hue hubs protects the network from that problem?
Do I want to attach my 185 bulbs direct to HE, or do I want to attach my 5 Hubs.
- Speed/performance considerations?
- If I go without Hue bridges, am I still able to utilize all of the IOS apps?
Also, are there any videos on how to instalj HubConnect. I am missing something. I never see or can find the Oauth prompts, I think n step 2 or 3. I have been able to install the built in apps, but this is my first import.
Last of all, is there a way to have both HEs in the same dashboard?
HubConnect. 
'Mirror' all devices from the 2nd hub to the 1st and run Dashboard from the 1st.. one set of dashboards with devices from all your HubConnected Hubs (SmartThings, too.)
Nothing will protect you from that, the problem is ZigBee lamps are designed to be left powered ON all the time so that they create a strong mesh for themselves and the other devices on that network. Turning the power off to them will cause no end of issue.
I prefer them on my HE hub but that's because I only have lamps and a few buttons on my ZigBee network so they run fine. There is no limit to the amount of lamps you can have on HE providing the hub is in a central location to them (purely for speed reasons).
Yes but this is when it becomes tricky, if you change something in the app it is not instantly updated in HE where as if they are connected to HE directly when you make a change in HE obviously it knows about it. So if your running automations from HE is can cause the sync issues if you control the lamps from the Philips app.
This answer is a bit confusing... the OP asked he he goes WITHOUT Hue bridges, can he still use the Hue iOS App. The answer is actually no.
I believe the OP should keep the Hue bulbs on his Hue bridges. This allows the use of the Hue App on the phone, Hue direct integration with Alexa/Google, bulb firmware updates, power loss/restore features, etc...
The Hubitat to Hue Bridge Integration is via the LAN, so no real disadvantage to keeping the bulbs on the Hue bridges, except the sync issues mentioned above.
There is a lot to consider here. I am beginning to think that I should keep my bulbs and my Hue Bridges off of HE altogether. I can control my lights on/off with Lutron and HE. Do all my cool scenes with various IOS Hue Apps. Then, I can front end combined use cases with either Alexa of IFTTT. This should also allow me to run everything on one HE. Make sense?
Are your Hue smart bulbs being power cycled by Lutron in-wall switches?
They are being turned on and off by people turning Lutron wall switches on and off, as well as automations. They are not being reset, only turned on and off.
In that case, you're probably right... Add the Lutron stuff to Hubitat, and leave the Hue stuff on its own.
Personally, I would never power cycle smart bulbs via a switch, except Sengled bulbs which are designed to do so as they are not Zigbee repeaters. They also cannot be paired to a Hue bridge, either... 
Correct, rushing the answer and misread the question 
my bad.
From reading through this thread I'm thinking that it is possible to connect Hue RGBW strips directly to the HE hub thus enabling me to power off the Hue bridge.
I only have 3 strips, no bulbs.
Before I go though the pain of doing this could somebody confirm that I can connect these strips directly to HE.
TIA.
Yes but they are ZLL just like the bulbs and you may get disconnects or dropped messages from ZHA devicea on the same mesh.
Thanks for the reply @Ryan780.
Maybe I'll swing one over from hue to HE and see how it behaves.
Although everything is working OK it would be nice to power down the Hue bridge as it only has 3 strips on it.
Seems like overkill.
It's a total mess where I have all my hubs.
Need to tidy things up.
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