EU user here; Hubitat unit still in the mail (for at least another week).
I considered getting a Homey, because the featurelist is great and it's sold at a lot of places where I live. But I stumbled over a review from Poul Hibbert. Short version: he said it s*cked, for reasons I won't go into here, and suggested Hubitat instead. List of supported devices is smaller, device looks more complex, but community looks SO much more friendly. And Devs are actually posting in the forums - which is beyond awesome! So dear Hubitat folks: You can thank Paul Hibberts and your awesome community for bringing in new customers! 
I had a rough smart-home journey. I started with Amazon Echo and DIY Raspberry Pi solutions years ago - but quickly got frustrated with how hard it was to do even really simple things. So I decided to just capitulate and wait a few years (or four...) until the whole area had matured.
Now, my second journey has started. With Hubitat. And I am going to need reliable devices which work with minimum effort (when possible). It's not that I am afraid to code or mess around with config files or protocols - it's more a case of "I have better things to do than making a button send a primitive signal to a smarthub". It just feels like such a waste of time. So I'd rather reward vendors with good devices that are easy to work with, and pay a few extra bucks for them.
Many of the devices listed on the official page are not easy to find in the EU. Some are, but I suspect the list is heavily "US centric" which is off course fair. Some of the brands are so unknown that it's hard to even force their presence into my Google Filter Bubble...
The most easily obtainable brands of smart devices for me are: Nedis (which I am told is a variation of the "Tuya platform"), BleBox, Nexa, Ledvance, Netatmo and IKEA. Off course in addition to the major stuff like Google, Samsung, etc.
I find it hard and a little unintuitive to start my first round of procurement. I ordered 5 cheap test devices form various brands just to have something to play with when the Hubitat unit arrives. But I would love some input from the community about how to go about buying and installing new devices. I consider myself "lucky" that I don't have a large pile of older devices that drag me down. I start with the current-gen Hubitat and a clean slate.
So .. now what? Do I go for Zigbee, Z-wave, Wifi or all of the above? What brands should I avoid? Are any of the brands I mention above known to people (and known to work or not work)? Do I need range expanders of some kind? Or do I link two Hubitat units? If you have been in the Hubitat community for some time, and you could start over without the anoying baggage of old stuff, how would you go about it?
I am not a rich guy, but I am willing to spend more to get mature quality products rather than cheap chinese-crap. I prefer stuff that works out-of-the-box, but if the best solution is a certain amount of DIY then i am capable of small/simple soldering jobs, replacing firmwares, using Pi's and Pi Zeros, and slight adaptation of existing code/scripts. I am an IT professional, but no longer a true dev (it's been over a decade).
Our house has an older "Smart Home" system from Schneider Electric (formely "LK") but the API is proprietary and known to be a PITA, so I am not expecting to have any proper integration with that. It's stable and solid but dumb as a brick. It will be gradually replaced with newer tech and Hubitat as the core.
I don't mind using cloud-based services, but I want them to be a supplement to my ecosystem. Voice commands with Echo and Google Home is nice, but I don't want my wife and kids laughing at me if the lights don't work because the internet connection is down.
Thanks for whatever advice you throw my way.
