I bet quite a few people would be less annoyed about Nest and others if someone made a good alternative.

From what I've seen there is a) fully cloud-enabled stuff, b) cheap china crap with security holes and c) "enterprise" solutions with prices and hardware demands to match. No-one makes something with the features of b), proper security and the price+polish of a).

There is quite a few "IoT" devices I want to like, but they come with (to me) unacceptable limitations.

Just to make it clear, I understand that this has similar development effort and Nest probably couldn't have done both at the same time. I just wish there were a few companies outside of the as-cheapest-as-possible spectrum that made "boring" consumer devices.

I agree. The problem is that "boring" won't make money and "great" is too expensive. So "boring" has to be cheap (read: crappy) to work for the manufacturer.

Unrelated, but I had a similar issue when trying to find a "dumb" TV: most of the high-end screens come attached to crappy software that you know will stop receiving updates 2 years down the road, and the cheap ones were super low quality. I got lucky in the end, but it took a few weeks of research to find the right balance.

Yes, it generally seems that "dependable" isn't a very good value proposition for consumer devices anymore. And in the speicific example, the enthusiast market, that might care about having things locally, is a) small and b) seems to prefer to get the cheap stuff and fiddle with it

That's true, and the risk of providing that DIY.

The truth is that most of those come with the remote access features disabled, and when they are carelessly enabled by someone who doesn't know what they are doing this will happen.

But like I said, many of those systems out of the box only broadcast to the DVR locally.

EDIT: Since I see you're a Nest/Dropcam person, I'm a Honeywell guy. Haha. We can still be friends. :-)

Oh! Nice, I actually know a guy who works for Honeywell out of MN. He's in the Aerospace division though (just found out he's kind of a big deal... weird, I know him through my girlfriend's family and had never checked his LinkedIn page.)