To be fair, two VRUSB sticks were defective; that’s not a Z-Wave issue. In addition, there’s a small possibility that since the VRUSB was ordered from same vendor, the batch may have been hit with same manufacturing defect (or the same defective stick was sent back).
If you do get a working VRUSB with supported OS, then hopfully your opinion will change.
I do agree that whoever designed the Z-Wave installation process made some short-sighted design choices. It would have been much better to use a spoke-and-hub (similar to RadioRA and ZigBee) instead mesh network. The 20-30 foot range is too short. Recent Z-Wave versions have added Explorer frames, support for high powered inclusion, network wide inclusion, and 100Kbs increased network speed. Unfortunately, manufactures such as Leviton are not always transparent when they upgrade their hardware. As someone recently showed me, Leviton has updated some of their products to support security/beaming. The newer version uses a green instead of blue box. In addition, the new VRMX1 dimmer, supporting CFL/LEDs and advanced Z-Wave features, is two times the price of its Incandescent version.