I have exactly the same problems.
(And I know about many other people encountered these things during the last 8 month too...)
- Dry-lightning destroyed my expensive house control system (Teletask) (Through the Wi-Fi antenna!)
- Promised myself never buying anything expensive or Wifi-related thing again, will spend only few$ on SHIELDED hardware.
- Bought all kinds of cheap relay boards and dmx led dimmers quickly.
- Installed OpenHABian to a Raspberry Pi
- Tried to attach MPC23017 GPIO extensions >> realized I2C works only 10-20cm
- Tried to create I2C-tiny-USB adapters >> not reliable, freeze on Pi-restart, changing bus-number
- Bought some cheap Arduino Nano board remakes, ($5) hoped it will be easy from now on....
- Realized there is Node-RED. Yeaaaah !
- Found the "help" page and learned about firmata / gpio node. Yeaaaah!
And had to realize at the end:
Firmata is NOT reliable to use in industrial environment!
I've opened a topic for this not a long ago. Now we are 2 to find a solution 
At the end, you'll see a link to the new topic with 4 possible solution I'm working on...
