I’ve dabbled with Tasmota a few times, but I have to say that I’m not a fan of it.
I prefer to write my own code for my Sonoffs etc and it give much more flexibility.
I have a mixture of the WiFi smart socket devices. I live in the UK and there are fewer options available for us, as out sockets are different to the EU style sockets. I also have a holiday home in Spain, which obviously uses EU sockets, so that give me much more flexibility about choice. I also use some Shelly1 devices, as well as home-built Wemos D1 Mini/Pro based devices.
I also have a door entry system, solar charge monitor, weather station, blinds (persianas) controller, aircon controller etc that all interface with Node-Red and that gives me the option to control them via Blynk, Alexa, Nextion touch screen, 433MHz fobs or raw MQTT commands.
Everything is controlled via MQTT messaging and I have two Node-Red servers, one in the UK and the other in Spain. I’ve been using Blynk cloud for my apps for a few years, but I’m probably going to migrate everything to local servers running on the same RPIs that act as Node-Red and MQTT servers.
I’m not a fan of the Node-Red dashboard, although I haven’t re-visited it for some time and it might be worth a look again. I looked at Blynk for exactly the same reasons as you, and I love it, especially when used in the way that we use it.
Not sure if you’ve seen this topic that I wrote a while ago…
It needs updating a little, but the basics are still valid.
Pete.