Remember the old project management paradigm
You can only optimize for one, get a second one, and loose on the last one.
So if you want good & easy, it’s going to cost;
… if you want easy and cheap, it’s not going to be good;
… if you want good and cheap, you’ll have to wait another decade.
In my mind, if you want to easy setup and quality solution, you’ll have to go with one of the 3rd party solutions. Maybe Lucid with some other layers by some system integrator or something more fancy.
If you want fast and cheap, you need to find the freelancers that don’t mind a klunky home-made patch work and make it work. Problem is those, who fit that bill, likely have their own idea on how to do that, so you’ll become a circus master.
Tinkering is nice to a degree, but at some point in time stuff just needs to get done, and so you have to just pay for it and then send someone else the bill. Flexibility in staffing levels comes at a price.
Otherwise you end up here:
They tried to make a word play on this paradigm. Except, when you read it carefully, it means they optimize for fast and cheap, which would mean it’s a van full of crap (from China). Which is more or less accurate these days with Amazon.
Be careful who you hire for your marketing…
PS: In fairness to China, in the early days when they were just cheap labor and didn’t the know the products, it was all cheap crap. But now that China has a middle class, the products they design and use themselves are quite good, sometimes better than ours. Of course they still produce cheap crap for export they don’t care about and laugh their way to the bank. We have family there now, so we get on-the-ground reports.
