Hack-A-Day has an article on home automation (https://hackaday.com/2026/06/20/home-automation-simple-vs-easy/) that has drawn a lot of good comments. The article was about a podcast with Elliot and Kristina where they talked about their home systems: Elliot has a completely off-line DIY system, and Kristina has no automation at all. Both had good thoughts/reasons for their decisions, but the comments are pretty good - both those for automation, but interestingly (considering the very high tech-orientated audience of H-a-D) many against automation.
One thing that I liked was that Elliot has his system running on a separate WiFi network - not attached to the Internet. That was something that I had not considered before.
My plan is to eventually have a separate Network for my home automation but I want it to connect to my main network for remote control and monitoring. I also want to try to keep wireless communication to thread mostly, for IOT.