As I continue digging into this I am becoming more convinced that none of us really knows all of the many ways to configure MQTT…
We had a pull request just this morning as someone was trying a new combination of bridge/broker that unfortunately they did not specify. See here.
I suspect that menaceone had a combo between broker and thing config files that just didn’t work out.
Going through the forums, I see this post which appears to be the source of the heat pump example. There is a combo of bridge {} and separate bridge/thing files in this one.
I’m about to log in to my vpn to see if I can test the method of defining broker and Generic MQTT channels separately… stay tuned for more documentation updates if I figure anything out. Please comment if you have all of the answers (or if you’ve tested any of this)