Chris is definitely the expert here, so I don’t doubt that. I have been investigating my Z-Wave network a lot in the last months and put quite some time into it. Basically all powered devices work pretty well (I am especially a fan of the fibaro wallis), though battery devices - and almost all sensors are of that kind - as often mentioned in the forum are sometimes beasts. The other thing you should avoid are dead nodes as they create a lot of issues.
Regarding the issue you mentioned I would recommend to check what is happening on the network - I have put a lot of hints here.
[SOLVED] Unresponsive Z-Wave Network: Tools and Approaches to track down the issues
Following these guidelines I was always able to get the devices running again (though I agree everything should just run without putting effort into it!) - btw, I use the AEOTec Gen5+ stick. The main reason is because their support is amazing in case I have an issue.
As far as Zigbee is concerned (I use the deconz binding) I noticed that some of the zigbee door/window sensors (aqara) react a bit faster than the Z-Wave ones (fibaro) but I guess this is not due to the speed (which is not so far off from each other afaik) but rather how quickly they wake up and send the info. Again Chris surely knows that much better. On the other hand at least the mesh seems to work better on Z-Wave than on Zigbee - I need quite an amount of “repeaters” (powered devices - I use plugs) to make sure my Zigbee sensors work reliably.
As far as Wifi is concerned I used a lot of the shellys. They work reliantly but surely they are part of your wifi network. So make sure each device is secured at least by basic auth (by default they aren’t) if unless you want ending up with your guests playing around with them 