Have you considered moving off bulbs into a system like Lutron ?
Yes but can,’t old wiring. The smart switches don’t fit in the old shallow electrical boxes.
Also an old house here. Invested in a lot of always on zwave stuff (light switches mostly) which resolved the mesh issues. It was not cheap. It is also not cheap as they are all failing 5 years later (why oh why Linear!) never got into zigbee because of this.
The best light switch today is in inovelli red no neutral great for old wiring.
Also looking at a home bridge primarily for my wife to use, but saw an Apple Watch control on another thread that was https, so looking at that first.
And agree with all the members here having a community is more valuable in the long run
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JJ11 you really don’t need to make this difficult as Grinchy mentioned with Hubitat you use the maker app and and the shortcut app on an IPhone or IPad to control those devices with Siri my kids do that now. Me and my wife have Android devices my 3 of my kids have IPhones they can control everything in the house. I setup the maker app and each one of them created IPhone Http shortcuts on there iPhones and it works great for them. You can keep the Hubitat hub setup the maker app then setup shortcuts on your Idevices that can be controlled by Siri. Problem solved.
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Can you give an example? Other than the mesh issue you’ve mentioned (which I wouldn’t consider to be a bug).
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You are coming up with excuses why you can't do this or that. What can you do then ? To me it just sounds like you are talking yourself out of a jam now but don't know how to fix it.
The answer is simply this... You are going to have to work for it. It's not going to be spoon fed to you here. We have all moved from one hub or another to Hubitat and we all had issues doing it but we overcame that by asking the community and googling if needed.
Most of us have had to use a RPi for one thing or another to get things working for us on Hubitat and some didn't and still others wrote apps or created drivers that would bridge what was missing for us here.
Hubitat does not spoon feed -- you have to work for it and the rewards are high because YOU built it.
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I’m pretty happy with my hubitat setup and I can’t even code anything for myself. But googling and following instructions, asking questions in the community here, goes a really long way.
It’s still work, but it’s kinda fun.
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This describes my experience as well.
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@jj11 Honestly we want to help you, you just need to let us instead of why you can't. You did, after all, come here for that reason.
People who are Ambassadors and developers are seasoned pros at Hubitat. And some developers like me also work for smart home companies so we do know what we are talking about. @ogiewon is a smart guy and @aaiyar is very good at his approach to hubitat. @srwhite knows his stuff also.
Your issue with reach -- well in this case you need to use repeaters for either z-wave or zigbee and there are plenty of posts here for that. Tons and tons of posts dealing with all sorts of issues and many with solutions.
If you already doubt yourself then you have lost the battle.
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To be clear, I'm not in the same league as @ogiewon, @srwhite, or @anon61068208. But I'm good at following directions ..... 
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You may be conflating the certification of a device ('Works with HomeKit') to mean "closed system". The fact is, HomeKit is not a closed system.
HomeKit's API documentation is available to developers. Home Assistant and openHAB and HomeBridge are all able to present non-certified HomeKit devices as full-fledged HomeKit accessories.
In addition, Home Assistant can act as a Homekit controller. That means it lets you pair a certified HomeKit accessory to it (instead of to an iPad or iPhone). This means it can directly control certified accessories. None of this would be possible if HomeKit were truly a "closed system".
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I had a thermostat that was a Homekit compatible device. I set up HomeAssistant and enabled Homekit. There was absolutely no configuration on the HA side, the thermostat was just discovered as I am sure anything Homkit would.
I was working on an HE app to connect to HomeAssistant and got as far as being able to turn the thermostat on and off. I am not a programmer so it took a forever to get to the point I did. I used the websockets interface for what I did but there are likely better ways. I think having a simple way to get Homekit devices straight into HE would be a useful thing to add to HE.
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You’re absolutely correct. Thank you for the clarification.
IIRC, Apple’s initial HomeKit certification process required specialized hardware which had to be added to devices. While not a closed system, this did create a significant impediment to manufacturers being able to easily support HomeKit. This greatly slowed the introduction of officially supported HomeKit devices to the market.
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+1
Most HomeKit accessories are Wi-Fi based (some are Bluetooth) so Hubitat has the needed hardware to get the job done.
FWIW, I have devices in my home that predate what most people nowadays call "smart" . Nevertheless, though the use of Home Assistant's HomeKit integration they are presented as HomeKit accessories. For example, I have a hard-wired door-lock (over ten years old) that I can now ask Siri to lock/unlock.
Agreed; it certainly did act as an impediment. There was an expectation that Apple would make a huge impact but the certification process did appear to constrain the number of available devices (and Apple's impact was muted). Anyway, they did create a solid protocol, and opened up their API docs, so the end-result is devices that can be controlled by more than just Apple iPads and iPhones (and HomePods). Plus it's local, not cloud-based.
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Not being a programmer, I just don't have the skills to take what I did any further. If anyone would like to take what I have done and make something out of it, let me know. I don't know how BT support in the HA implementation of Homkit has progressed, but as of 7 or 8 months ago, it wasn't functional.
If homekit had a better interface to work with automations, included more advanced conditions, and allowed zigbee / zwave device control, I would consider using it as my main controller.
I currently have Homeseer 4 configured and ready to be used as my main controller but it’s far to buggy and missing features I want.
I keep coming back to Hubitat, but the constant reporting of slowness and the need to reboot daily keeps pushing me to evaluate every beta update Homeseer puts out.
My main goal is to have a system that just runs without constant maintenance. It’s honestly driving me crazy to have to babysit these controllers.
Totally I just want something that works. Without worrying about range. The Hubitat would crash just messing around with the modes. Plus the app ( your main interface) was child like. I might try Hue today. There is just a big hole missing in all theses systems. Wink would be perfect if it was developed more and worked with HomeKit.
It's not that it "wasn't functional" (implying it existed but failed to work), it simply didn't exist and still doesn't exist. So, yeah, it's still not functional. 
There's only one developer enhancing Home Assistant's HomeKit Controller integration (and he does it part-time of course) and support for Bluetooth is on the roadmap but far down the road.
Currently, he is making progress converting the underlying code to use async calls and the next milestone is to add event-based triggering (as opposed to simply polling; currently it polls every accessory every minute thereby making some accessories, like motion detectors, impractical to use). Once all of that good stuff is in place, perhaps he will have the time to address Bluetooth support.
I should point out that unlike commercial (paid) products, where features are market-driven, open-source projects create features that are of interest to the project's contributors. So if no one, with the requisite programming skills, owns a Bluetooth HomeKit accessory, they're far less likely to devote their spare time to creating an integration for it. I suppose the same is true for Hubitat's community-built contributions.
There's a section called Feature Requests (in the HA forum) that I've called "where good ideas go to die" because unless the proposal attracts the attention of a developer willing to implement it, it never sees the light of day (regardless of how many users want it).
In contrast, if the majority of Hubitat users want native HomeKit support, it might actually get on the official roadmap.
I have been following that thread. My last post was a few above yours.
I suspect probably most on these forums, myself included want a system that "just works"... I do like to explore and fiddle but ultimately I have responsibilities to others in my life (WAF/SOAF etc) so there does need to be a workable baseline.
Seems like there is always a trade off - Either vendor lock-in/higher cost/less choice/more stability or device "freedom"/lower cost/less stability/more fiddling.
"Home Automation" has been so over-hyped/marketed by the industry that the consumer's expectations exceed the reality of the technology. This IS a complicated subject with complicated issues. Hubs like HE can provide enough of an abstraction to offer a workable solution for a reasonable investment if proper care and attention is taken.
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