Hi Ronni,
Yes, I did buy a Voice Bonnet and made a rhasspy satellite … but the Voice Bonnet is now back in my parts box. I remember that I was unimpressed with the push switch being located immediately next to the left Mic and left LED, complicating design of a case for the satellite.
Ahhh, it was connected to my RasPi Zero in the kitchen (has pixels.py and button.py in its history) - so I guess I had a good reason for swapping to the reSpeaker. Probably it was the whining noise in recordings which tech support blame on the PSU - despite it being an official RasPi Power Supply Unit.
Adafruit are using the same HinTak fork of the seeed reSpeaker driver, so there was no difference as far as the mic audio and tutorial are concerned.
I am not only also in OZ (Wollongong), but retired so I echo your thought about expensive. As for preferences … I have been advising against RasPi and reSpeaker because it’s expensive (well over AUS$100 when you include case, PSU, etc) and reSpeaker driver was abandoned by seeed over 5 years ago. The ESP32-S3-BOX 3 ($77.46 from Core Electronics but out of stock) seems a much better option with current development per Home Assistant Year of Voice Chapter 6 which adds local wakeWord.
Sounds like you should have another look at MQTT. Arre you using the Home Assistant add-on Mosquitto broker ? I did create a HA user “MQTT” (I’m not very creative with names),
Honestly the only thing holding me back from converting my rhasspy satelites to HA Voice Assist is that all my automations are in node-red, and I haven’t yet put effort into sorting out the link to wyoming.