No, they are one of the cheapest and easiest to use.

Vaultwarden is the way to go. What is your issue with it?

I’ll take that tiny amount of traffic telling scanners there’s no password auth over having to remember port settings for ssh, scp and rsync any day.

Thanks for elaborating. While I think that is a far cry from "some very basic features" being "utterly impossible", I see the point, but I disagree that this a common experience.

HA is meant as the central point in home automation, meaning it is consuming sensor data, automating actors and showing everything on its dashboards. Following that philosophy, long term storage is meant to be written to by HA, but not consumed from there.

Then you are also running a very non-standard MQTT setup that does not conform to the usual conventions. If it were, you could make use of the autodetection capabilities and make sensors (and actors!) work very easily with HA/MQTT. I played around with this myself in a little toy project which I use to control my linux machine via MQTT and this worked wonderfully.

I'd argue you are very far away from a typical use case and naturally you will run into problems making it work. That's FOSS software for you, you can try to work around it, you can work on the missing features yourself or you can leave it. But it's not fair to pretend your very special use case is some kind of measure of the project's quality. People have built amazing things with HA, far from "exactly the path someone had in mind".

Can you give some examples? That has not been my experience at all.