I’m using various wifi lights with Google Home, facing delays and malfunctions. I want a simpler system with local control. Is Matter worth the investment, or Zigbee better value? What are the best value hub, bulbs, and switches? I value simplicity, but would like some complexity. I don’t mind learning, but want future proof. I’d like to automate things like the light color shifting to warm white around 8pm and decreasing intensity, but everything bright daylight in the morning.
In your position, I’d start with local control - you can do this with your existing devices. They’ll still be on wifi, which isn’t ideal, but you should get much better response times when your devices are just pinging a controller on your local network instead of a cloud server.
Once you’ve got local control established, then I’d start looking at gradually upgrading/replacing devices.