I have a Reolink but haven't got to Home Assistant yet. I'm happy switching to that, but for less technical (though still digital savvy) spouses - how would you say the switch would be for them?
I'd say it depends on what you are trying to do. If it is simple device control and media playing and other stuff, then all you need is to update [dashboards](https://www.home-assistant.io/dashboards/) when you add/move devices and the users will find it pretty easy and straightforward. My parents are not extremely tech savvy but they find Home Assistant easy to use when I make the dashboards thoughtfully.
Making automations and scripts is getting easier every update, but it has a small learning curve as the logic can get complex and you sometimes need to know details like entity IDs or raw states. And there are some simple missing features that some people are very used to. Home Assistant is improving that sort of thing constantly, but sometimes the device APIs do not allow all functionality without the OEM apps.
For example, the two biggest camera-related things that are missing in my opinion is that the camera viewer does not allow zoom or two way talk. It uses the native browser media player, and on both a Samsung tablet and all iOS devices, this means that you cannot zoom and pan around the image. This is obviously not an issue if you embed a dashboard such as Frigate into the HA UI, which IIRC supports both two way talk and zoom. But YMMV.
Basically what they said but you can do two way talk too! For me Frigate is the way to do cameras and there is a HA addin which does take a bit of configuring but there are loads of decent docs.
Home Assistant is quite a beast but start off simple and work on. It will repay you every step of the way. The first hurdle is to get it on the internet and usable via the app. Get that sorted and you are well on your way.
Make use of dynamic DNS to register a name to IP address and Lets Encrypt to sort out a SSL cert. There are add ins for both of those.
You can also subscribe to Nabu Casa and external access and a few other things will be taken care for you. 31 day trial and https://www.nabucasa.com/pricing/
You can put it on a separate VLAN with no internet access and watch it via your own app eg Home Assistant, Frigate, Zoneminder or whatever.