A bit late, I just noticed this thread … but since I was in the same situation and went through the same type of internal battle, I thought I share those of my experiences that I haven’t seen mentioned (apologies if so, I didn’t read it all).
I started with no light switches and motion detection based lighting in a renovated part of my house, a hallway. It became obvious that this doesn’t work satisfactory under all conditions: detection relies on battery and it does not cover every edge of the hallway, so lights aren’t turned on always as fast as you would want them to. Note your expectations rise with new tech you install, and so do other people’s: if it doesn’t work the way they expect it to, they don’t consider it to be an improvement (although objectively considered it is).
The new capabilities lead to another problem you didn’t have earlier: I like fade-in-fade-out, my wife does not. I want a different brightness level shan she does. Today, right now, I want to have a different color than my automation just selected.
Bottom line is that in these situations, my wife wanted to have the capability to change lighting to match her preferences. So I added some switches back in. She does not make of use of them often, but it’s important to her that it’s not me to determine all the details (to match just my preferences).
And it also applies to myself. Automation can’t provide the ‘right’ lighting ambience to always match your current mood (until computers will be able to properly read your mind, which you probably don’t really want them to).
To always fiddle out the smartphone or to have tablets everywhere are annoying options that don’t match the simplicity, haptics and speed of use that a switch provides.
Not every lamp needs its switch. You do not need to have the 1:1 switch:light everywhere any more, but you need at least one of those 1:1 per room, to match electrical codes and to provide a feeling of safety to everybody to not trust in the automation system as you do. We found one switch per room to be a good compromise.
Also, you might want to have it the other way round: to use light switches to not switch lights but other household appliances or scenes.
Quite some of our switches were actually turned into scene controllers since. So you control multiple lights, plus rollershutters, TV etc. with one click, for different applications, e.g. a ‘leave house’ scenery switch at the front door.
Some switches are even both: one click toggles or dims the hardwired light, triple click is to activate a specific scene.
