It's a good thing I don't do this for a living, because I don't go very fast. Mostly it's because I act like a dog that goes in a different direction every time it smells something new. I've worked through several things without updating the project log. Here are quickies for those:

• I'm now using the SparkFun ESP32 Thing. I chose that mainly because it's got enough available pins, and I had one right here in the parts department.
• Now that I have moved to an ESP32 board, I found a very nice Lua implementation from this European education (not sure) project: whitecatboard.org. The thing I like about it, compared to the NodeMCU flavor of Lua, is that it has true threads via Lua-RTOS-ESP32 instead of just co-routines. I think the threads are going to simplify my software quite a bit.
• For a while, I was planning to use this D-duino-32 V2. It has a small SSD1306 OLED screen right on the board. I don't really need a display for this project, but I thought it might come in handy for the software development phase when it wasn't convenient to have the serial console running. Although the display is rather common, and there is good support for it in the Arduino/C/C++ community, there isn't currently support for it in Lua-RTOS-ESP32. I considered porting a graphics library into the Lua-RTOS-ESP32 ecosystem, but it seemed like more work than I felt like doing.
• While looking into the display possibilities from the previous bullet, I decided to have a look at the displays that Lua-RTOS-ESP32 does support. I was completely shocked to find out that these days you can get a 2.8 inch 240x320 TFT display (with touch interface! with an SD card slot!) for under $10 from multiple vendors if you can wait for shipping from Asia. What? And, you can get it faster in the US for only a couple dollars more. Like I said, I don't need a display for this project, but that doesn't mean I can't jam one in there with some contrived rationalization.
• Putting the display into the project definitely rules out using a single-gang electrical box for the main control unit. The display module itself will not fit. I've decided to move up to a double-gang box and will mount the display horizontally. I thought it would be pretty easy to find a clear plastic blank faceplate, but it turns out to be difficult. In fact, I never found one. I settled for one with cutouts for two ordinary toggle light switches. It's the kind of faceplate where you can put in your own wallpaper so the plate matches your walls. I may later decide to use a normal opaque blank faceplate and cut a rectangular hole just right for the display (though I'm sure I'm doing a better job in my mind than I will in practice).
• I finished the schematic and the PCB layout. Even with a double-gang enclosure, it was still tricky to fit everything on the board. I made a sort of layer cake out of it. The voltage regulator module is going on the bottom side of the board (which will be handy anyhow if there is any modest heat buildup). The ESP32 module is on the top of the board. Because I plan to mount the TFT display using tall-ish female stacking pins, the display sits on top of the ESP32 board with plenty of clearance. The other small parts are scattered around both sides of the board where they fit well or where I thought they would be most convenient. There are tons of screw terminals for connecting wires from the remote boxes.
• I sent the board Gerbers off to Seeed Fusion and am now waiting.
• I have not started the software yet, though I've been doing some mental planning.