As most probably know, Maker is the at home version for ignition, for those who didn't know, now you do. My question is what benefits am I actually getting using Maker software opposed to developing my own GUI through python? I just can't think of a scenario other than keeping the ignition brain juices flowing, even my "extreme" at home applications (Home garden irrigation, Garage door, Smart lights) I never felt the need to use Maker, actually I felt as if it would've slowed me down.
I mean, yeah. If you're well versed enough in GUI development, go ahead and use whatever language you're comfortable in.
Maker is great if:
- You don't feel like architecting an entire client/server setup with prebuilt mobile apps, desktop applications, etc to connect.
- You feel like learning more Ignition or keeping your skills up to date.
- You want to take advantage of Ignition's particular connectivity options without rolling everything yourself. Yes, you can hook up an OPC server, an HTML frontend, database connections, MQTT connections, etc with Python yourself... but you're going to write a lot of code before you get to the "solving your own problems" part.
All that said, it's not like Ignition's going to be the perfect solution for every problem. If you don't like Maker, you're entitled to a full refund of the purchase price 
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Just to clarify this was not a topic to talk crap about Ignition Maker Edition, I was just curious on any applications that it would make more sense to use it.
No offense taken.
I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that the ultimate business case for creating Maker was "give folks who otherwise wouldn't use Ignition because of the price a chance to do so, and hopefully that translates into some sales at some point".
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I use Maker edition as a quick way to create a GUI to write the results of manual aquarium water tests into a database and to pull up trends of past test values. I guess I could have written a GUI using tkinter, but it would have taken me longer to do and would probably look like it's running on Windows 98. 
Using Ignition also lets me easily pull up the data entry form on my phone or iPad.
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I use Maker Edition in conjunction with Home Assistant.
Home Assistant is usually a snap to set up, has countless integrations, is spouse approved, and runs fully local.
Ignition Maker allows me to customize much more on top, but I don't want to depend on it for critical home automation logic that would disable after a while if it was no longer able to phone home to their license servers due to internet/grid/etc outage.
Out of curiosity, is there anything you're using Ignition for that Home Assistant wasn't able to do? I was interested to start using Maker edition for some home automation stuff when it came out, but I quickly realized that Home Assistant pretty much does everything I want.
HomeAssistant absolutely has the better suite of connectivity options for consumer use. It would be really nice if there were a de-facto protocol - MQTT and Zigbee are reasonably common, but there's still a ton of fragmentation in the ecosystem and basically zero incentive for device manufacturers to, say, integrate with Matter or some similar omni-protocol.
Until/unless Ignition achieves a similar mindshare with hobbyists as HA (which, again, is not really something we're trying to do), your connectivity options will absolutely be less. I would argue that your stability guarantees may be better - I don't have much personal experience, but I recall there was some significant shakeup in HA a few years ago where the YAML syntax is mostly deprecated and you're supposed to do everything via GUI now? Admittedly, you have to do that for Ignition, too, but our backwards compatibility claims are as strong for Maker as they are for our for-profit editions, because it's all the same codebase internally.
Put another way - if I were to invest in a smart-home setup, I'd personally almost certainly use HA if my primary goal was to have something that works, quickly, with consumer IIoT devices.
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