[vladvasiliu]

As others have said, there many things which are much more practical to implement with "smarts".

In my case, I love my Hue (and similar) lights. It's not just a question of not getting off my ass to turn them on and off. It's the fact they can be dimmed, that at night if I get up I always press the same button, but the light won't blind me. I can also easily change the colors when I'm watching a movie, etc.

Yeah, I could probably buy separate dumb lights for each purpose, and turn them on or off according to the need of the moment. But I live in a small, rented apartment, so having random wires and tons of lamps all over the place would be much more painful than fiddling with an app (which actually works quite well).

However, I agree that the smarts should be able to be easily bypassed in case they don't work. With Hue, the lights can be configured to turn on automatically when powered on for example, so I can always turn on the light from my dumb wall switch if the controller is dead.