Three things lighting control actually gives you

Lighting control has not meant a switch on the wall for a long time. It means dimming, keypads, schedules and control from a phone, but the reasons people end up glad they did it are more specific than the feature list suggests.

The first is security, and it is the one people underrate. An empty house is a target, and the most effective deterrent is a house that does not look empty. Lutron's Smart Away randomises lights through the evening as though someone is moving around inside. Failing that, a schedule built from your actual habits does much the same thing, lights coming on and going off roughly when they normally would.

The second is how it looks on the wall, which sounds trivial until you count the plates in a room. Instead of a builder-grade white rocker, you can specify dimmers and keypads in finishes chosen against the wall colour, with custom engraving on the buttons. In a house where somebody has thought about every other surface, the switches are usually the last thing anyone considers.

The third is scenes, which is where the system stops being a nicer switch. A scene sets several lights across one room or the whole floor to preset levels with one press, dinner, welcome home, everything off. They are built around how you actually use the house, and you can have as many as are useful.

Automation goes a step further: waking to lights that come up gradually rather than an alarm, or geofencing that triggers the welcome-home scene as you pull into the drive. And because lighting integrates with shading and AV, one button can move all of it at once.