Well quite a number of people are happily using ZWave, also with the Aeon stick, so sorry but yes your problems must be related to your specific handling.
But you would need to give way more specific information if you want people to help.
A couple of things to note:
- if Insteon works, you at least don’t seem to have a fundamental radio problem with your building. Still you should ensure that you have enough mains powered zwave devices to be able to form the mesh. Remember battery powered devices will not forward messages.
- the stick cannot loose items. Items (and things) are a OH config components that you just map to IDs on your zwave network.
- Ensure you have a gen5 stick (not the old S2 one).
- in OH before 2.4, zwave mesh healing was disabled.
So if you did include devices while having them close to the controller, they both believe to be in direct range of each other. If you move the device away and out of range after that, communication will fail.
Normally, the healing process would regenerate the mesh once a night (identifying nodes to route across), but this process was disabled before 2.4.
If I was to guess then that was your main problem.
So if you used on older OH version (you didn’t tell), I would give it another try with 2.4 or better 2.5M1.
And please follow this next time: