I wouldn't call them overpriced (at least not all products), their quality is typically great, you get what you pay for. We have had Hue lights for over 10 years (pretty much every light in our house is Hue) and never had any issues. I think over that period one light broke. And like you said, the integration is great. In our house we have it configured to use both through the Hue hub and SmartThings.
> their quality is typically great, you get what you pay for.
You're lucky. I also have almost all lights from Hue, and in almost 6 years I've had 6 or 7 completely dead bulbs (out of ~40). One more lightbulb failed in a weird way - it sort of worked, but in 90% of cases refused to completely turn off and still kept some of the LEDs lit. I haven't bothered to disassemble it to see how that happened. And one more light works normally, but somehow fails to report its status to HomeKit. It can be controlled but always shows up as "updating..." - guess it's a software bug of some sort, since it works in the Hue app.
No Home Assistant here at the moment, just regular Hue+HomeKit setup. I have tried HA a few times, but found no significant additional value over what I already have. It's just as dumb as all other "smart" home solutions, still has very limited diagnostics if something is not working (maybe if one really groks its internals it can be debugged better, but I don't) and requires maintenance. I was thinking about building something with plain simple Zigbee2MQTT and a bunch of DIY scripts to make it a little smart, but haven't yet had time for this.
Yup. I paid like $40CAD for a single Hue lightbulb in 2017 and it's still going. In that time, I've had countless cheap Canadian Tire brand (NOMA) & Walmart brand LED bulbs burn out and need replacing totaling WAY more than $40.
I just looked and they have gotten like 20% more expensive though... that said, their non-smart bulbs are still pretty affordable comparatively.
We have almost two dozen Ikea Tradfri bulbs and they've been great. We had a few older Hue ones too, those never seemed to keep their state across power loss and their light quality was pretty bad given the price, really not impressed.
I wouldn't call them overpriced (at least not all products), their quality is typically great, you get what you pay for. We have had Hue lights for over 10 years (pretty much every light in our house is Hue) and never had any issues. I think over that period one light broke. And like you said, the integration is great. In our house we have it configured to use both through the Hue hub and SmartThings.