I hope that advances made in security for these commercial systems (by necessity) trickles down into the residential space, sort of like how "dumb" construction techniques, high-efficiency window glazing, etc., have all made their way into the residential sector over time.

The difference is that commercial and industrial buildings already try to minimize costs. In the residential space, occupants often aim for comfort over cost - sometimes missing out on opportunities to retain comfort while minimizing cost. So there may be more relative opportunity to cut costs in the residential sector than commercial or industrial. Of course the sector with the largest opportunity is probably transportation.

Despite loving cool tech, I have nothing like Nest in my house for exactly the reasons you stated.

Maybe Honeywell should move downmarket with your post as the basis for their marketing. I might actually consider it then.

There's more money to test in that side of the industry, I'd wager. Unless the people developing commercial HVAC are simply better software/hardware developers than consumer companies' solutions.

Sometimes this is true, relative to the purpose at hand. Take a mediocre web developer and ask them to build a smarthome system, and you end up with a wire protocol of raw, unverified, unfiltered Python code in plain trxt, running under eval() on a grossly underpowered microcontroller (true story, was fixed eventually AFAIK, not naming names).

There's something to be said for the discipline that comes from working in a resource-constrained hardware/software project. We could benefit from more cross-pollination between industries, as long as experienced engineers are sanity checking the resulting ideas (Python is not a protocol!).

If a go kart manufacturer made a kart whose roll over cage failed in any circumstance we would not excuse it by saying that there is more money to test in the automotive side of the industry.