@bill.d That's good information, A few thoughts.
There are three ratgdo firmwares at the moment. You mentioned MQTT & ESPHome but there is also a Homekit firmware. That might be a good alternative for HE users who rely on Homekit for dashboarding and have little automation.
ESPHome support in HE is at a dead end, as you've mentioned, it's complex and is best used via a HA integration. While I play with Home Assistant, I don't have the integration with HE going as I found it resource-intensive and chatty on the HE side.
As far as MQTT goes, as you indicated, the best approach requires a local MQTT broker running on something like a raspberry pie or bigger. Note that most people running HA will be running MQTT so it might be easier to run the MQTT firmware with my driver, rather than relying on the HE/HA bridge.
I'd like to suggest an alternative that might work for some people and that's one of a cloud-based MQTT broker, of which there are many. The downside is that you rely on a cloud appliance for local garage control, of course. The upside is that it's easy to get going, free and you can always upgrade to a local broker, in time.
