Having built two primarily zigbee based home automation networks over the last 10 years, ikea had become indispensable. Their devices were at a reasonable price point and worked really well. You did not need to use their hub either and just had to use any zigbee hub that offered drivers or so form of generic implementation for the device type.

While matter and thread have been around for a couple of years now, I would deem that they are still in their infancy. It is likely that problems that were previously solved are going to reappear.

And given that these are devices that are foreseeably going to be in service for a decade if not more, any new mesh network is going to have to be built up gradually unless someone replaces all of their devices. My network would not work without the meshing as some devices are too far away from the hub to operate. I'll probably need to stock up on some ikea devices if I want to support my existing zigbee network for many more years

Just waiting on them to start supporting Linux again...

In addition to the feature branching you could also look into feature toggles. A feature toggle is a variable used in a conditional statement to guard code blocks, with the aim of either enabling or disabling the feature code in those blocks for testing or release. While this approach would not prevent unapproved code from being in a release, it would act as a gatekeeper to determine if a specific feature should be exposed to the end user. I however am not sure how you could address your concern for the database

I wrote this message hoping that someone would read this and come up with a solution. I could always myself one, but with my schooling and lack of time I am unable to start any projects. Wouldn't it be simple for them just to add ssl support to there websites, they could even use a self sign certificate, at least it would still work at some extent.