And, therein lies the rub. You can do anything. At some point, you will want to take your architecture upwards and onwards, and that can become very difficult because user customization and third party device drivers were free to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted to. It can put you into a very limited box when you want to make changes to your system's plumbing. You won't be able to make hardly any assumptions at all.
It also means that third parties can create drivers that only they have the code for, which in and of itself can become a stone around your neck, because you'll have customers who depend on them, but you can't modify them to adapt them to changes in your architecture. The Homeseer folks definitely experienced the realities of that problem. You also can't do anything if the folks who wrote them disappear and you have customers who depend on them but some problem crops up, or the device is upgraded in some way and the driver won't work with it anymore. You can say, well, we didn't write it, not our problem. But the customers don't tend to see it that way. They will say they only purchased the product because they could control the hardware they have.
There are pros can cons to anything. But, in this case, our approach has more pros than cons. Or at least it avoids a huge number of cons, whatever its pros may or may not be. The insidious thing about going the other way is that you don't often realize what the real cons are until it's too late.
Anyway, not trying to start a fight, just explaining the situation as I see it.
