> I'm against a lot of smart home things

What I like about IoT is the idea of hacking them :-). Of course I don't want connected devices running proprietary firmwares anywhere near my LAN.

Also one thing is that when a company sells an IoT device, maybe they mass produce it and it's cheap. Whereas if you wanted to build it yourself, it would be harder. Getting relatively good and cheap hardware and putting your own software on it is nice!