@denise.grider
I agree with what you are saying 100%. However where we draw that line is different for each person.
My concern are the times we are not home, maybe away for a week on vacation. The day to day stuff is not nearly as much of a worry.
Regarding the thermostat..... that's why they put plastic lock covers on thermostats in many establishments 
@csteele
I've had a similar experience. My wife, an artist, is not even slightly interested when I talk about automating something......... that is until she see's how it works. Now she loves the ability to tell Alexa to turn on / off lights.
Actually she has a love / hate relationship with Alexa.
John
As a product manager of a large software package by day, let me just say HE is doing a great job.
Their job as a company is to evaluate the market and build a desirable product that solves the core problems they've identified as their customer opportunity in an efficient (and profitable) way.
Customers (especially in an online forum, frankly) tend to assume that the items they most want (even collectively when using a tool like Aha or Uservoice or even this forum they use has voting capability if they want to turn it on, see Plex's forum) is the thing that would lead to the most success as a company.
That is somewhat frequently not the case.
It is often nice to have that feedback tool, and to be able to gather community feedback, but as others have touched on it frequently creates outcry when the community misses the mark but insists on itself. HE is run by HA veterans. Unlike myself who wants everything shiny, they know what gets the most use, and what needs to be implemented for a successful system, and based on their interaction on the forum they clearly are reading and digesting the community's input.
The biggest potential derailment we have in modern R&D is the early community involvement opportunities. Community run projects that turn to business ventures have different pressures on them. Products that users are using during active development (like HE, it was functional when released but not feature complete- the community expected this, they as a company expect to provide updates and keep selling more hardware as the software evolves). The company gets big benefit from being able to have revenue flowing and even from the feedback coming in, but the pressure from the community to alter their original business plan and roadmap is immense and can lead to a severe niche product where one faction of the community pushes them into a corner that isn't nearly as marketable.
Anyway, rant from the product person, HE is doing a good job, a voting system would only help if they feel they aren't getting the feedback they need. As a customer long term roadmaps and priority reports are nice but typically flexible anyway, so I just keep enjoying the pace of the releases and keep working on my use of the product.
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