Correct me if I'm wrong, but Dweet doesn't really solve the use case of "I want to connect my hobby app with existing third-party APIs without having to do manual integrations". It's great for home IoT setups, sure, but that's not the main use case I care about.
Great write up! We found many of the same issues as you did when we tried connecting devices, so we created dweet.io.
We are not a substitute for MQTT, but we made dweet to help you get your things online quickly and easily so you can concentrate on making apps. Standards take forever to hash out, so we made something that can get you going really quickly.
Have you had a chance to look into dweet? https://dweet.io is the homepage, so let me know if you have any questions.
This comment's sales pitch tone really comes to a crescendo around "Have you had a chance to look into dweet?", just FYI you may want to avoid this type of language in the future.
Freeboard is in public beta right now and there is no charge. We will post price information soon, and we will always have a free option, like dweet.io.
All current functionality will remain free. New functionality that we end up building may fall into a paid category.