Definitely, and I do take your point on heart beat. I did not intend to advocate one single solution for all. I guess in the end I have to mix push and pull mechanisms to cater for e.g. reinitialisaton of my HA system.
At the moment I am trying to understand Node-RED. Hope some more knowledgeable people can share "reference flows" here or on the WIKI.
For the moment I am stuck on the MQTT connector. I haven't found yet what I can specify in the topics field. I have seen some of the examples. For instance, can I filter there on a specific NODEid or is that supposed to happen further downstream?