> Honestly, my main issue is not even the price, it's that devices cannot be stand-alone anymore.

I'm wondering where the impression fo" not any more" comes from. Really the situation hasn't changed much. You can have your HTTP webinterface. You can have HTTPS with a selfsigned cert and click away the warning. The only thing that really has changed is that for your HTTP connection you will get a warning that the connection is not secure.

I don't think the ability of browsers to load HTTP pages will go away any time soon.