Im going to throw my 2 cents in here. I used to have my head in the sand thinking control systems will forever be needed. And although they will be needed at the top end of the market the middle to middletop is eroding.

I have an elderly client that is losing the use of her hands. She wanted voice control to turn the systems on and to specifically search for shows on netflix/hulu/amazon etc. Now I've done this before with C4/alexa but it was for basic commands, favorite channels etc. There is currently no way to integrate that with roku in the sense of searching for shows via voice.

After doing some research I found that Sony Voice enabled TV's have the ability to work almost entirely on voice. I told her I could try it but we may need to resort back to C4/Alexa. I used a 950G/ES1100. After some basic setup the entire system was working entirely off voice/sony remote. Including changing inputs on the AVR, controlling the sources etc. She could search "Mrs Masel" and it would find it on Amazon. Search Ozark and netflix would come up. Tell it to play pause etc and it worked brilliantly. Tell it to go to Apple TV or Roku and it would switch the AVR. Obviously this doesn't work for the cable box but she used Xfinity for that.

It worked Brilliantly, and at that moment it dawned on me that we are just about at the point where even the single room systems don't even need a control system. I tried to break it for over an hour and just couldn't. It has been installed for over a month now and she LOVES it.

Obviously the cable box doesn't work with voice through Sony but it works with the remote via CEC. She is only using the Comcast remote for the voice aspect.

Samsung works similarly well but their remote is beyond dumb, so that is a non starter.

Even though the current generation doesn't use "apps" we need to be cognizant of the generation that is coming out of college and have good jobs, and will soon be able to afford "us" you need to adapt. If you hinge all of your bets on a control system you will be hosed sooner then you think. Speaking of that, Snap4 showed how out of touch they are by releasing NEEO without any voice capabilities. This was a catastrophically dumb move on their part.