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I have similar experiences. Everything seems extremely clunky and pseudo-simple. Some very basic features are utterly impossible, for most things you have to write config by hand and there's absolutely zero guidance.
To me, HA looks like a legacy enterprise project, that only works if you just happen to follow exactly the path someone had in mind when building it plus a bunch of half baked add-ons, where it seems like the maintainers lost interest after a while.
Can you give some examples? That has not been my experience at all.
Sure.
My setup here is pretty simple: a handful of temp/humidity sensors that push their readings to an MQTT queue, which then is read by Telegraf an written to InfluxDB. Optional complexity: I would prefer these sensors to delay the acutal send events, so they can push a batch of readings in one go.
Now, ideally HA would be able to read the data from Influx as a sensor and even import the history. I tried the Influx integration, was told to configure that in the config files and literally for days I tried to get everything to work, but it just would not work. I can't even list the different error messages here, it's been a few weeks, but the consensus seems to be, that Influx is essentially not readable for HA for reasons. Like, there's no error message that I could make sense of, it's just generalFuckYouError 5446.
Ok, then maybe I can read the measuements directly from MQTT? I would have duplicated data, but I can always delete old data in HA, so that's ok. All my sensors currently write in the same topic and each message contains the sensor name, a timestamp and two measurements. That data structure however is utterly unreadable in for HA. Obviously, I need to split the messages into different (HA-)sensors based on the sensor name field and then differentiate between the different sensor values (humidity/temp). That is not possible. Like, it is completely not supported and the official stance is to put a bunch of MQTT listeners for each sensor/value pair in your config and then filter the messages based on sensor name and reading. Well, that's really convenient! Especially for the completely outlandish case, that someone might want to automatically add new sensors.
But ok, I played ball. I set up two testsensors (so four listeners in total). And it kind of worked. Until I noticed, that each message is processed once, which is perfectly in line with MQTT semantics, but it meant that messages that didn't fit the listener they happened to collide with were just dropped. Awesome!
But ok, next try, I've got Telegraf, that thing can probably help out. So I created new topics for each sensor and value, in a nice hierarchy and created a bunch of HA listeners, each having its very own topic.
And that finally kind of worked. I still can't batch-import messages, because HA ignores MQTT timestamps, I still can't dynamically add new sensors, I still can't "fuse" sensors belonging together (hum/temp do kind of correlate, after all), etc. etc.
My case isn't really unusual and not really complicated, yet it took me literally weeks to get to this point and it's still a clunky, semi-functional clusterfuck, whos only benefit compared to Influx is, that it has an Android app.
Disclaimer: I might mixed some thing up in the description above, it's been a while. And I'm certain I could make some things nicer, but that's not the point. I'm a senior software developer and can't get this pile of Python to run. Maybe I'm really stupid, but I'd say HA is the culprit here.
Looks like an user error to me. Influx is for long-term storage of history and data, you don't need it for automation at all.
Looks like this is not up to you to decide.
If you would have read my comment, you would have noticed, that I intend to use Influx as a long term DB and use HA as automation around that. BTW: The thinking you're showing here is exactly what I'm criticizing. You think that DBs and automation have no connection, so you decide, that I am the idiot for even trying. This is literally what I've described above.
Also, I wrote quite a paragraph about the fact that I already accepted the idea to ditch the direct Influx integration.
So you use the free thing wrong, don't RTFM, vent on internet and then vent some more when corrected? What's your end game?
Nobody corrected me at all. It's just "yeah because u stoopid".
I did read the manual. I did search for solutions and tried different approaches. And I documented that above. You seem to ignore that.
Why do I vent here? Because that's the question of the fucking post! Read the post! That's exactly the question.
Why do you have to be so stubborn? Can't your accept, that maybe, just maybe, HA isn't directly sent from God? Is HA your religion? Does that religion prescribe only skimming comments and just reacting on keywords to rile yourself up?
Seriously, this pointless, self-righteous arrogance is the reason so many people hate "nerds". This entire thread here is basically the "well ackshually" meme in text form. Reflect a bit in what you're doing here.