re: Multi room audio questions / packages

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Essentially, yes. But current Gen Sonos amps (and I think yours, too) have 2x gigabit nics. So you can plug up 8 amps to one switch port and won’t sniff saturating the bandwidth. So if you’re willing to run Cat6 for hdbaseT, I’d assume you’re willing or equipped to do it this way, too. But you don’t need to. The wifi way will work fine assuming it’s reliable. My point was basically: unless you’re replicating the HDMI out from a streaming box and simply using one streaming box per TV as the only source, all the popular ones can fit neatly on the back of a TV with a $10-20 mount and make way more sense than an additional costly system to maintain, and it will be a lot more reliable.

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I agree with this. After giving it thought if I were only using a apple tv as my only source I'd slap one on the back of a TV and airplay2 the audio over the network to my centrally located Sonos amps. I don't watch a ton of TV and 99% of the time these days its just something off a ATV in some fashion.

This is what I will do for my outside TV I think. I have a fire stick on that TV just so it was something cheap being outside and rarely used for more than some sort of sports. I have a Unifi SG pro, poe switch, and their APs and I'm updating that to the newer UDM pro and the wifi 6 APs so the network will be strong with 1gx1g internet. I just have to learn and figure out my setup with vlans and allowing everything to talk to one another across them.

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pay for a dealer-only system

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I got a quote when I built from the company that did the pre wire and security stuff. For the price of a pool you can get some fun automation stuff (back then) but you are locked in and you have to PAY to make them come out and program changes or swap out equipment. Not for me. Since I had a few network cable drops at each location I got a cheap hdbast solution from monoprice for the one spot I needed. I use it for my projector in my den but im going to try to replace that with a newer hdmi run. While it has worked well this whole time it has had its issues that just having a hdmi would solve at this point.

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But if you want anything more than that, even two sources of video per zone, it rapidly becomes much more complicated

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Yep the only spot I would have more than one source is my HT/den area and I just use my receiver as the switch.