I think once upon a time it zigbee may have been more popular than z-wave but devices need controls I think z-wave has an edge there. I get your point though, there is some historic precedence that might have driving this current state where items are missing (such as an LED strip but not a bulb) from one protocol group to another. Wifi is the most common wireless protocol in typical homes and business and yet that market is absolute mess for smart habitat work because vendors are more interested in sucking up market share so they can say they are number one instead of agreeing on a standardized and open protocol that gives consumers a choice to integrate whatever they want instead of having to get locked into once thing My point here is that, despite currently popularity or historical precedence, the market seems to eventually increase the breadth of products across the most popular protocols.
This leads me to answer you question. I have a pretty extensive and well deployed 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz wireless network. As you know, 2.4Ghz is a very noisy band on a good day. Yes you can get zigbee and 2.4Ghz wifi to co-exist be why fight that battle (and honestly, probably loose in the long run since bluetooth is also increasing) when you can use another band and avoid this problem all together. That was an easy decision for me even without the controls advantage I see with z-wave. For my situation this has been a win if for no other reason than troubleshooting connectivity issues when they happen.
Another way to look at this and also the reason for my post is that this is more of a device issue than protocol issue. Even if wanted to add a zigbee stick in my OH server, it seems like there is only one type out there (probably whiteboxed / OEM’d by one company). That means the market is bound to have more offerings sooner than later so I wanted to ask if anyone had come across what I was looking for first before I decided to do something else or wait.
That said, looking at the WLED project (thanks Matt) made me take a second look at WS2811 strips since they seem to meet my requirements. That then lead me back to DMX which is supported by OH. While I don’t need addressable LEDs for my project this time around the DMX stuff has been around forever and supports these 5 channel strips. Something like this DMX512 decoder (SP201E… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07F2V4WFV/?coliid=IN9X5548E9C7P&colid=UONKZU2167XA&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it) appears to support both. That unit and an SP108E (like his… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DVJ568C/?coliid=I2JJ0VC42ROHSS&colid=UONKZU2167XA&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it) are similarly priced. In the case of the SP108E, I read somewhere on the forums (Magic Controller SP108E - #15 by wars) that that might be supported by the OH wifi binding (WiFi LED - Bindings | openHAB).
I’m really still thinking through this because the options and product breadth does seem to be changing regularly. I was strongly considering the Aeotec or iNovelli’s LED strips but both were discontinued which to me was a yellow flag on this market. LED strip project are more labor intensive and I’m more interesting in the solution details than just hacking something together to get it done.