I ran with the comfort control a little further then HVAC and Fans... i added curtains the open/close on time of day and outside temp. I also added a casement window and skylight so that when it’s super nice outside during fall - spring in TX they open up and cool the place off reducing my need for AC.
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I would much higher recommend these instead of the zooz 4-1, they do everything the zooz does except lux (which isn't really a lux reading anyway), and they are much more friendly on your hub from being slowed down from the excessively log chatty zooz 4-1's. They are also cheaper.
You will find a wide variety of opinions, although I believe that the one thing that brings all users together is the strive to "Improve their Experience and Quality of Life in their Home". This can mean very different things to different people, LOL.
Just a few examples:
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I love how HE replaced my existing alarm system / you are crazy to use HE as your alarm system
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HE is about automating your home, why would you want a wall tablet / the wall tablet is the best thing about my HE
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I never need to use wall switches anymore, everything is automated / I like to still use my wall switches, I installed smart switches so I could turn all lights off at bedtime and lights on/off while I am away.
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etc..., etc...
Although, I think you could get everyone to agree on their use of HE to "Improve their Experience and Quality of Life in their Home", this means different things to different people, and that is O.K. What is right for me, is not necessarily what is right for you and that is how it should be.
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My real automation journey (I did dabble in X10 and other stuff back in the day) was when we bought our cottage, we wanted to be able to monitor heating in the water pump "shed" so that it would not freeze and also monitor water damage from water leeks a bit all over the cottage. So after looking around at different monitoring systems, I looked at ST but just did not like the fact that it was cloud based, HA was a no go because I just did not want to get into all the complexity of it just for the above features needed. I stumbled upon Hubitat and after lurking the forums and reading a lot of threads I finally decided that this would be my choice because of the possibilities there after.
Then the wife saw all the capabilities like remotely setting the thermostats, lights and more and before I knew it, she was pushing me to get this and then get that, etc... So now I have 2 hubs (one at the cottage and now one at the house), but have plans of selling the house, tearing down the cottage and building a new house on that lot next to the water where we have the boat and all.
So we are buying stuff and testing everything out so that we will know exactly what we want when we will start building the new house. We do have many things automated and like the wife, we much rather have automations running and not have dashboards like many have. Inovelli switches are used to indicate status of various states in the home and we try to use presence sensing as much as possible for lights, fans, etc.
We even wired the boat with a ST arrival sensor to turn on dock lights and some backyard lights when coming in after dark, this has been one of the nicest additions.
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I've been playing with Vox Commando. It's a paid-but-relatively-inexpensive Windows program that uses the Windows speech recognition libraries, but it does so on the PC it is running on. I'm about to move my testbed setup to a stick PC that'll be on my firewalled IoT network.
Integration with Hubitat is pretty easy to achieve using HTTP scraping from VoxCommando and the Maker API on Hubitat.
I am working on a little driver to let Hubitat see the VoxCommando as a SpeechSynthesis and SpeechRecognition device, but I'm not sure how much that will change most specific actions being on the VoxCommando side.
For me it mostly began as a hobby! I realized I need a hobby that let me "make things that have function".
I'm seeing its most value-adding propositions as highly customized HVAC control (for right now my HVAC system is space heaters and a window air conditioner controlled by connected switches managed by Hubitat)...
And lighting. My wife and I have very different preferences for light levels and when we build our new place we're planning on dimmable lights everywhere, Lutron Caseta dimmers, and full Hubitat integration that I intend to play with for the next three years until I can be confident of being able to see enough to use my house, without bothering my apparently-night-vision-possessing wife. 
A word of advice from someone in this hobby and who also built his own house, build a nice tall attic with at least some subfloor. I pre-planned the hell out of my wiring but once you move in everything changes. On paper, TV should go here! Run cables. Moved in? Tv looks terrible there! Also, tech is constantly changing and I am constantly needing to run new cables for things. So don't stress over the pre-planning, just give yourself easy access to change things in the future.
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Oh for sure! We're doing our best to plan that in. I think I'm going to end up with less attic than I wanted because of some other architectural decisions we had to make, but I'm planning on asking for spare conduit in my exterior walls and a few other things to hopefully make up for some of it.
#4 and #7 are big ones for me, neither of which I have done (ugh). I would like to set up a dedicated wall mounted tablet for dashboard control and viewing of perimeter cams as well as direct control f devices. A big want and I’m 75% there on is monitoring if my cat is in the garage with a Bluetooth LE tag so we don’t accidentally open the garage doors and let him out. I’m trying to get HE to recognize the tag with a Rpi Zero located in the garage, then turn on a colored light in our laundry room (path to garage) and hopefully prevent big garage door from operating.
Other than that, turning on lights prior to sundown or be able to recognize that it’s gloomy out and not enough light in the hoist so HE turns on living room lights. Oh, and bathroom fan control for high humidity. My son is horrible at remembering to turn the fan on before the shower. It’s like entering a sauna after he gets out. Lol
IF, and honestly it would take me winning the lottery at my age to be able to afford it, I could get a house built, I would ABSOLUTELY have it built with full standing height / decked attic, and I will one up this, complete with an actual infrastructure closet like you would see in a business office, basically a small air conditioned room that had all my network gear, ethernet, VoIP, Coaxial, etc.... run into it. Run all the ethernet ports I could possibly want, and, well have my network gear racked in a space bigger than a small walled off section of closet.
I'd still place the HE hub / hubs down in the living space where we are providing services as then are #1. Tiny, and #2 actually effective closer to the stuff we are controlling.
I should mention some other things I will LIKELY automate but am not going to do yet.
Blinds.
I haven't brought this up here, but I am having mobility problems due to arthritis in my spine. I have cordless blinds which are fantastic, until I have to raise / lower them. If there is a way to automate these, or replace these with good quality automated / smart blinds that would make my life easier.
And I totally agree with the improve the quality of life in the home comments. That is what it is all about.
Honestly, after my ADT, then Iris, then ADT Smartthings experiences with security, honestly HE couldn't be worse for security if they tried. I am not trying to build Fort Knox, I am trying to keep idiot neighbors friends out of my property and on notice a bit.
You wanna blaze up in your back yard I honestly don't care. You want to consider coming into my house and grabbing my stuff, you are going to have some serious problems.
I was never edgy about security from my neighbors before the last set of renters. It wasn't the parents, it was the dumb a** pasty kid that wanted to be a rapper type that was trying to fund his career by selling uh, unlicensed pharmecueticals, and the imbeciles that brings to the neighborhood.
And this is coming from a guy whose apartment living experience included my downstairs neighbor shooting her boyfriend in a dispute over whose cocaine was in the kitchen...
I do NOT miss that apartment, or those particular neighbors.
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I haven't done #7 in HE yet, I was doing it with ST. I am sure HE handles it, My Iris sensors have temp readings. I use my non contact thermometer to validate the readings, adjust in software, then set up a rule, if temp from sensor blah between A and B, set fan speed to 1, if between C and D set fan speed to 2 and so on.
Had not considered gloomy daytime for lighting automation. Dangit now there is something else I need to consider. I have come home from work with it being dang near midnight black due to storms and I really should do that.
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We had a house broken into while building our new house. It changes you. One of the first things I did in the new house was setup an alarm system. Smart home seemed to kinda follow that.
As far as number 7 what I'm doing is pretty simple and its making the house really comfortable. I have an ecobee thermostat, but this could be done with any thermostat I'm sure, but when the ecobee reports the AC is idle, the ceiling fans turn on, then when the ecobee changes to cooling mode, the fans turn off. This way there is a rather constant air flow throughout the day. You never get that extra cold from having both running at the same time. Works for me anyways. It would be better if I had a thermostat I could read from without using the cloud tho, so it would be a bit more instant.
We moved from a high-cost-of-living area to a low-cost-of-living area. Our new house was a lot bigger than the old one, and had many more lightswitches. I got tired of adjusting the same lightswitches the same way every day as I moved throughout the house. That was the start of it.
Hmmmm. Not sure if the Honeywell does that or not. Going to have to look into it. Honestly I don't mind the momentary push of cold air though, I actually kind of like it. A good example right now. It is 75 deg F, yeah we stay a little cooler than many, and I pay for it, but I digress,
My speeds jump every 2 degrees Below 71 deg F, the fan stays on low unless we are in away mode. At 71 the fan goes to medium, at 73 medium high, and at 75 high, or max or whatever. Or in HE speak, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%.
Now that there is that, I need to figure out a rule to make that happen, and I also need to figure out how to adjust temp readings from the sensors in HE.
I've never had a break in that didn't involve a roomates ex, and technically it wasn't a break in, but a keyed entry when she should have been there escorted. Long story that I don't need to go into. Nothing like coming home from work with your roomate to find the apartment trashed, and his ex girlfriend naked and dang near alcohol poisoned. Neither of us had any idea how she got a key. Or at least he says he had no idea. Oh well that was technically his couch, and she actually cleaned it up / paid for dry cleaning services after she sobered up.
The lesson I took away from that, no roomates with crazy girlfriends. I am way past that phase in life at this point...
Oh and FYI, they got back together, he married her, they had 2 kids, she wasn't spectacularly sober, or faithful, they got divorced blah blah blah. You know the song and dance...
Home automation - all tasks that need to occur at a similar time or on a semi-fixed schedule to maintain the climate, lighting, safety, irrigation, pet access and contribute to the comfort, safety and operation of the home and it’s occupants are performed without any physical interaction. All items that are not criteria, schedule or occupancy based are available via voice.
Home control - controlling the home systems from somewhere other than it’s fixed location - I don’t care about this nor have any desire to use this because HA already performs all needed functions.
I like smart tech which appears to also be dumb. Love having the option of lights activated by motion sensors, or by a cool dash, or by an automatic 'holiday mode', or simply by the wall switch.
Multiple zoned heating was a fairly involved project for me involving some clever webcore, nodemcu s, relays, humidity sensors and thermal actuators for the rads.
Security with text messaging was high on my initial priority list.
Propane heated, remotely controlled hot tub was another.
All in all - its a hobby. And I've loved learning all that I have so far =)
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To put it in the wise words of an 80s philosopher:
I just wanna have fun! 
Yeah, my lights have a setting (not really sure which device that routine, rule, setting is controlled with - Alexa, HE, or the Wiz color bulb app) that bring them on about 30 minutes before sunset but the gloomy day thing is really the icing on the cake. Get that figured out and boom.
The problem is if you use a light sensor in the room to detect the light level and then your automation turns on lights because it’s too dark then the room lights affect the light sensor reading so they turnoff the lights and you have a runaway feedback loop.
I think you need to determine how dark it is outside, the time of day, maybe the weather conditions (overcast), general occupancy of the dwelling and is that room occupied. But how do you monitor someone sitting in the room watching TV for let’s say a two hour movie or the news and not turn off lights because they are sitting still? So much logic that has to go into this.
LOL, funny enough, the living room lacks motion sensors because I didn't want to have the dog turn the lights on while we are watching a movie...
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