Slow to no response on ZooZ zen35 button presses led me to a ZWave rabbit hole and I think it's messed up



I have a C7 running 2.5.0.143. I recently transferred everything over to a new C8 pro and then wiped this C7 to dedicate to my home theater setup. (I know I can use the C8 but was trying to keep it simple for my husband to manage)… After doing all the required setup I successfully added 6 devices: 3 Zooz Zen35 scene controllers, 1 zooz zen37 remote and 2 zooz Zen56 RGBW dimmers. This is all that is on the hub.

I created 3 simple automations: 1 scene that turns Can lights, Sconces and LED strips to full bright, 1 rule machine that turns Cans to dim, Sconces to dim, LED strips to full bright blue, 1 Room Lighting that sets everything to dim. These took a while to get working properly - but they were working from the app interface and the button push I assigned on the scene controllers. Then today - nothing is working right. The delay was a solid 30 seconds and then only half the lights did what they were supposed to. No matter which button I triggered, nothing is working right. Logs are showing delays and time outs.

I started diving in to the support threads to find out what might be causing a delay and did all of the things suggested. One thread I came across said to make sure my zwave version is the latest. It wasn’t - it was 7.14. I followed the steps to update using the http://192.168.1.2/hub/advanced/installZipgateway718 but once this completed and I rebooted, my version looks like this:

VersionReport(zWaveLibraryType:7, zWaveProtocolVersion:7, zWaveProtocolSubVersion:14, firmware0Version:7, firmware0SubVersion:14, hardwareVersion:1, firmwareTargets:1, targetVersions:[[target:1, version:7, subVersion:18]])

The threads said that wasn’t good - that all the subversions should show 18 not just the target version section… I’ve shutdown, rebooted, rebooted with a database rebuild, but this doesn’t really help anything.

So my question is - is this zWave version thing a problem and is it causing my delay issues with the lighting automation I am trying to do? If not, anything else I should look at to fix the response times?