I understand some of the comments here around "optimizing the fun out of the game". I'd also prefer to acquire an intuitive sense of plant health, vegetable seasons, etc.

But I also get the appeal of systemizing things and think for the type of person who loves automating and building systems, I was astounded about the low cost. I would've imagined this kind of setup to cost thousands of euros.

I'm curious about the future of systems like these. We recently saw internet-connected supermarket freezers hacked, so I wonder if internet-connected IoT stuff will be as commonplace in the future.

I would imagine IoT to be even better, but hopefully less cloud-connected. I can see plenty of use cases in my own life where if I could put a microcontroller somewhere I could help iron out some unnecessary friction/do something fun and cool, but would never hand over that functionality to some faceless corporation to do whatever they want with my lightbulb data or what have you. It seems to me there's no point to that at all if you're just using some gadget you have.