I think you misunderstood the target audience of the Aruba instant on series. It’s a direct competitor to the Ubiquiti Unifi brand and solely designed for easy centralized management. You manage multiple sites from a single pane of glass. I work for an MSP and we use them all over the place for the ease of management it gives us. One dashboard to see our out clients switches and access points. If this isn’t you, then you’re not the target audience, but that doesn’t make it bad. With that said, if you spent a little more time researching, then you would have found that these switches can be converted to FULLY local management. Absolutely no cloud. It even has more features when locally managed. It’s not the fault of the product if you purchase a device without due diligence into the feature, support, configuration, management, etc.
Number 1 isn’t correct. The API requests are still there whether it’s the official app or a third party app. I can’t say if it’s true but the Apollo developer, Christian, said the the official app uses more API calls then his app did.