Okay, let me start by saying that I really do love Home Assistant. I believe that it is a fantastic piece of software, with very dedicated developers that are far more talented than I. Although, that being said, I strongly disagree with a number of their design choices.
My most recent problem has been trying to put Home Assistant behind a reverse proxy with a subpath. The Home Assistant developers flat out refuse any contribution that adds support for this. Supposedly, the frontend has hard-coded paths for some views, to me this doesn't sound like a good practice to begin with -- that being said, I mostly program in Go these days (so I'm unsure if this is something that is pretty common in some frameworks or languages). The official solution is to use a subdomain, which I can't do -- I'm trying to route all services through a Tailscale Funnel (which only provides a single domain; I doubt that Tailscale Funnels where ever designed for this purpose, but I'm trying to completely remove Cloudflare Tunnels for my selfhosted services).
The other major problem I've ran into, is that HAOS assumes that you would have no need to run any other Docker services other than those that are add-ons or Home Assistant itself. Which, I'm sorry (not really), Home Assistant add-ons are an absolute pain to deal with! Sure, when they work, they're supper simple, but having to write an add-on for whenever I just want to spin up a single Docker container is not going to work for me.
Now, some smaller issues I've had:
- There's no way to change the default authentication providers. I host for my (non-techie) family, they're not going to know what the difference between local authentication and command-line authentication is, just that one works and the other doesn't.
- Everything that is "advanced" requires a workaround. Like mounting external hard drives and sharing it with containers in HAOS requires you to setup the Samba add-on, add the network drive, and then you can use it within containers.
Again, I still really love Home Assistant, it's just getting to a point where things are starting to feel hacky or not thought out all the way. I've considered other self-hosted automation software, but there really isn't any other good alternative (unless you want to be using HomeKit). Also, I'm a programmer first, and far away from being a self-hosting pro (so let me know if I've missed any crucial details that completely flip my perspective on it's head).
If you got to the end of this thanks for reading my rant, you're awesome.
I think a VPS and moving to NetBird self hosted would be the simplest solution for you. $5 per month gives you a range of options and you can go even lower with things like yearly subscriptions. That way you get around the subdomain issue, you get a proper tunnel and can proxy whatever traffic you want into your home.
As for control scheme for your home automation you'll need to come up with something that fits you but I strongly advise against letting users into Home Assistant. You could build a simple web interface that interacts via API with HA, through Node-Red is super simple if it seems daunting to build the API.
If a RPi 4 is what you've got and that's it then I guess you're kinda stuck for the time being. Home Assistant is often quite lightweight if you're not doing something crazy so it runs well on even a RPi 3, same with NAS software for home use, it too works fine on a 3. If SBC is your style my recommendation is to setup an alert on whatever second hand sites operate in your area and pick up a cheap one to allow you to separate things and make the setup simpler.