I fully endorse spending time as you wish. I do however not understand the interest in home automation. "Good enough" to me is walking over to the thermostat and changing it if I'm too warm or too cold. This is almost never. I set a temperature that I'm comfortable with and then forget it.

Same with lights. If needed, I turn them on when I enter a room. I turn them off when I leave.

In my car I can't stand "automatic" climate control. It never works properly. The best system is one manual dial for fan speed and one dial or slider for heat with an on/off for AC. Simple, reliable, and adaptable to conditions that are outside the parameters of the automatic sensors and programming.