You are absolutely correct and I’m not saying that that’s the way for “everything”.
But What I see is that on the “other side” people/devs work more at a device level, so each device has its own “widget” pre configured, and not per binding. If you configure a Shelly 2.5 (oh god I might have made a mistake in referring the Shelly. I’m in no way complaining about the Shelly binding, I just used that example because it was the topic of my personal conversation for comparing both applications of the dev is reading this please forgive me! You’re doing gods work!.), then there would be a “widget “ or “template” made for that specific device.
I think that the best way to describe (without being too wordy, otherwise we might as well hop on discord) is, imagine that once you add the thing to OH, that inside the thing you have next to the “channels” tab, a “dashboard” where all of the channels/items are already there. You don’t have to create anything, all of the functions are listed, created and ready for use. Eventually you’d even be able to drag and drop it to a dashboard, but, for a new user they would immediately jump from “configure binding, find thing” to → “open created Thing and see exposed items ready for use”
That simplicity is, I believe, what some users are looking for.
Now I’m not saying that channels and items are not needed, what I’m describing is that they might just as well be automatically created. If they aren’t needed, we can delete them. The widget could be tweaked by the users. But for that first interaction with a new user, things would seem quite simple.
Doing this at a binding level would not work as you said @hmerk , or at least it would require an ungodly amount of work. I think that all of the pieces are already available. We have the templates from the marketplace. We have a community providing templates for different aspects of the system. What we would need is a place to connect those with a thing, automatically. (I’m also in no way saying that it’s easy 
but I do thing it makes sense if explained like this.)
hmerk
How should (would) openHAB or HA know what a certain Shelly device, to stick with your example, is controlling ? Is it s light ? Is it a socket ? Is it a rollershutter ?
All of those are relays, so just an on / off switch. But I agree with you, I’m over simplifying. I can continue using the Shelly 2.5 as an example, and from what I can think, it doesn’t matter if I hook it to a light, a rollershutter etc. I could always go to the item and change the icon, or the type. But the core basic functions would already be controllable. I really think that that’s there we may have a gap in functionality.
