Homepod as hub breaks home

Hi, I recently purchased a Homepod Mini to assist my family in controlling Homekit devices, especially lights. But also to add matter support for future devices.

After installing the Homepod everything seemed fine, until it took over as the home hub, our Apple TV 4K without matter support has been previously our home hub, devices worked flawlessly when the Apple TV was the hub.

Most of our lights are made by IKEA and utilize the Zigbee standard, a well proven and robust smart home standard that has been nothing but flawless in our experience. The Dirigera hub that controls these devices retains full and fast control over the devices connected to it. Solely making this a Homekit and Home related issue.

The Homepod Mini says that devices are offline, even though they are fully and without problem available in the Home app. This isn't a major problem, but the problems don't end here. Devices such as outlets and lights are displayed as double, thus as seperate entities where one is offline and another one is available. While shortcut buttons appear in the home view, even though they shouldn't (as this is automatically disabled and definetly have not been ordered to show up in the home view.). Sometimes devices are completely listed as offline.

Another thing is that the control of the devices has become extremely slow in comparison to what they were like when the Apple TV was the hub.

I've tried everything listed on Apple's support pages and instructions/forums. I've also contacted IKEA and consulted their instructions and support pages. I've tried all fixes and suggestions on Reddit and other online forums. To describe, I've reset and removed the Homepod multiple times from my Home and icloud. I've also tried to add the Homepod to another home, but as the device sits on the same Wi-Fi its reverted back to being the other home's hub even though not being part of that home. I've also tried to re-add all devices and removing the IKEA devices /integration from the home which had no effect and only caused a lot of unnecessary work.

This is extremly concerning as all of these devices are running on a network, that extensively uses ethernet has the 1 gig fiber speeds, and state of the art Wi-Fi 6E routers. In addition the fact that the Homepod is marketed as a home hub and as a matter hub but clearly fails in achieving these things as could be expected from Apple and the previous great experiences had with the Apple TV.

To further add, the IKEA Trådfri and Dirigera hub is supposed to specifically, is fully approved and supported to work with Homekit and matter (even though that doesn't matter that much in this case) and is a mass market home smart system.

It's also clear that this is an issue that isn't isolated to my case but has been extensively discussed by other IKEA and Homekit users and has according to others been reported to both Apple and IKEA multiple times but they seem to have taken no action. After reading these posts, it seems like Apple isn't willing to let users choose a prefered home hub or disable the homepods functionality as a home hub. I really don't care how Apple might eventually fix this issue, but just do it as soon as possible as this really breaks the functionality of my smart home.