There will be some Sense users, like yourself, who see the ML core of Sense as “crippling” and others who view it as a path to a simpler-to-deploy, more universally applicable and ultimately more informative method for energy use tracking. Circuit-level power measurement doesn’t go far enough (and look at the bill that your Utility sends you for another circuit-level solution!) and is more complex to deploy universally, for most. I for one have multiple devices on the same circuit.
I would ponder these systems at scale … the largest being, I suppose, “if everybody has one” and the smallest being “per-circuit drill-down into the energy use of multiple devices, including the behavior of components within those devices”. {Fridge light anyone?}. That “per-circuit” can be seen as a dedicated device on a circuit (great, can we get the fridge light?); multiple devices on one circuit (hard); OR your mains is the circuit in question (very hard); AND at grid scale (where the ML actually begins to have a chance) the problem becomes extremely hard because it also has to deal with the economies of scale.
If “lack of data detection is crippling”, I’m not sure you’re going to find a better option than Sense at the moment because the option you’re talking about isn’t doing so much detection as it is simply integrating watts.