It would probably make it more complicated, but I'm thinking about the situation where you have rooms and want to assign devices to one room, but also a zone like upstairs, outside, etc. Perhaps they could be a separate rooms and zones tags.
Well you can use one of the custom keys I am suggesting as your Zones key. Unless you actually wanted Rooms to be a subcategory of Zones which is another feature, not yet mentioned in this thread.
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For what it's worth, over the weekend I will try to summarise the ideas provided as some kind of distilled version of what people want, with my own take on things.
The clear winner in terms of likes, including my own, is @JasonJoel 's Tags. One thing I want to understand.... well encourage.... is whether people think this should include the notion of a tag name or tag category, whatever you want to call it. I work in the IT space, like many here I expect, and platforms such as Atlassian's Jira and M$'s Azure DevOps provide a tag / label option for tickets, but they are just a single string value. I agree with this option for these systems and use cases, catering for short-term tagging based on short-term uses of tags to easily identify items based on what are often dynamic requirements. In the case of a smart home or anything that is more long-lasting, some indication of what the tag / label represents seems more appropriate to me. And I'm not suggesting that @JasonJoel wasn't suggesting this, I am wanting to confirm one way or the other what people want to see....
For anyone who has stuck it out and read this far, the kind of suggestion I am making is that if you want to tag a device based on it's location or function, that apart from the value of "Living Room" or "Presence", that a tag type also be associated with that tag to identify the type of tag you are recording, e.g. "location": "Living Room", or "function": "Presence".
Keyed tag fields? When you're writing this up can you also give an idea of how you'd see it in the device list UI?
I just offer the idea .... 
I let the experts do the hard work.... I am thinking the idea of a basic label string value would probably be a first cut, but ultimately I would like to be able to have a filter at the top of the Devices or Logs page that has a drop-down list for "zone" where that is a tag I have defined with that name and assigned values to each device under that tag. I'll see if I can put together a more compelling example over the weekend.
Everyone has different needs, but for me simpler is better. Straight simple tags (without a type) is fine for me. I do see how categories could make things simpler when you want to filter on multiple tags of the same type though.
Also, the number of tags could get out of hand at some point. It could make sense to have a central "tag list" that is centrally maintained (in terms of additions/removals) instead of just random strings on each device. Just a thought - I could make it work either way though.
Would also be really nice if you could save filters in a device view and link to the saved filter directly. That could basically be the "equivalent" of the current rooms view, but much more flexible as the filter could be definable.
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Exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of as well....
In my view 1Password has a good implementation of both categories and tags. Gmail too. One thing about tags IMO is that they should be hierarchical.
1Password layout:
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Tags and Rooms are separate concepts. Tags being the easily conceptualized of the two.
Rooms have the potential of being a different automation paradigm. For starters I'd like to see devices grouped into a room get their own auto-generated State-Machine. There could also be some simple one button automations when certain items are present in the same room. A side bar would be a natural place for these options. One obvious situation is motion detection and a switch; you drop them in a room and there's a toggle to turn on motion lighting with some configurable defaults. Add the system wide Mode element and a configure Mode Lighting option appears. Add a lock, the Lock configuration is added to the rooms side bar. Rooms could have default variables like presence, time of day, and temperature. How about if temperature for a room could be aggregated from any devices in the room with that capability and presented without configuration? A State Machine could power most of these ideas.
I think a UI based this way could be more intuitive to new users. Tags, Filters, and Labels are all well and good. Rooms can be something more.
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The problem with these ideas is that something that sounds simple, like offering a motion lighting automation for a room that has both lights and a motion sensor, runs aground once you realize that there are a lot of relevant options for such an automation to work as intended. So just putting up a simple one won't cut it in the end. The complexity of what you're describing will quickly overrun most users' ability to cope with it, even from a UI perspective, let alone understanding what the options mean.
We do intend to begin crawling into offering more use of rooms in creating automations, but I have to emphasize the verb crawl, as in taking baby steps.
Or it could be completely confusing. Most people don't think in terms of State Machines.
We believe that KISS must prevail, or these ideas will sink into a quagmire.
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Reading back over my title for the topic and some of my early comments it does sound a little overblown, almost like I was intending to demand the list of suggestions be developed, which is not quite what I was aiming for.... Perhaps a summary is not really necessary, a little self-indulgent....
I can appreciate the complexity that could so easily come along with diving in too quickly and too deeply with some of the ideas here, so while it's interesting to brainstorm ideas, any change does have to be considered more broadly.
I'm guessing that may have been where I was at with my suggestions in the original post, auto-creation of groups, motion and contact sensor zones, etc, trying to speed up the configuration of existing, useful constructs that could also be maintained as devices are added or removed from a room. Not saying it would be easy, I can't gauge that, but I was hoping at least they could be more contained and hopefully manageable than some other areas where Rooms could be used.
I do also like the suggestion / request to have room membership synced across hub mesh.
Simon
I can see a lot of ways that just this "simple" request could spin into a massive undertaking depending on the architectural approach chosen.
Probably the simplest suggestion to come from this thread is leave the Rooms as is, or as the devs have already planned it to become, and add a simple list field for user-added tags, which can be filtered by but not grouped by. Might make a lot of people happy without really getting very deep.
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That could be true, now that I think about it some more, a room is an "object", not just another piece of data about a device.
Depends on how it is approached. In the simplest approach a room is an attribute of a device, and merely exists to provide a locational context or data for grouping/sorting (think this may be more of the current model). If a room becomes its own object then the construct of Contains comes into play, and the extent that actions upon the room influence the contained, and the events upon the contained influence the container start swirling around.
Yeah, my claim "is an object" is probably a fairly big assumption.... And I see what you mean, I hadn't gone to the point of playing out the potential implications, I just knew it could introduce plenty.
I starting going down the object path and immediately hit the can we have Groups that contain rooms and what does that mean for groups that contain rooms that have devices that are also members of the group in their own right exponential permutations situation.
Can you imagine the UI madness 
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That's why it's nice sometimes to play the role of the customer 
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I'm part of the tiny minority that agrees... today's IT world is a holy mess regarding security, reliability, complexity, and usability, because most IT people absolutely love solving simple problems with complex solutions.
Not trying to ridicule you but just want to understand what you're trying to accomplish because I have an open floor plan house so maybe this will be of benefit to me.
For me, if I want my dining room and living room lights to turn on (no wall separating the rooms) I just specify those two switches in the automation. I also have a group called "Living and Dining Room Lights". So what exactly would I benefit by adding the lights to multiple rooms?
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