Wow, some serious thought into this thread. Thanks for sharing.
I have something very simple that I'd like to tag on. I know it's going to seem petty, but I currently use ST's at my dads house (he's 86 yrs). The one thing I know I'd miss is the inability for the dashboard to show me activity of a device. I use activity around my dads house to know that he's up and moving around or I see the garage door went up so I know he probably left to go somewhere. So the activity is almost as important in that case as the current state. Maybe there is a way to get that, but I fairly new to HE and I haven't seen it yet.
I missed the full screen option too, its just not an intuitive UI pattern. Adding a full screen button or icon on the dashboard itself would probably be a better start.
I don't have the "Dashboard menu" option on mine (running latest version, did the update a few days ago).
I have a square icon that maximixes the dashboards as much as possible but I still have the IP address at the top where the url location would be with a X and (i) beside the IP....