I noticed in an imminent release for another controller that they are supporting instant push status updates from the Hue hub for onoff, brightness, colour etc. I always thought that polling was required and that in itself made it attractive to sometimes pair directly and not use the hub.
I know you intend Hue support , is this a new feature you are aware of and might support?
That would indeed be great.
Can you share what controller this is? Hue has some deprecated SDKs (which I’m pretty sure also basically worked with polling underneath too, even if they cached things or did it relatively fast), but the only supported method for third parties now is the HTTP/HTTPS API. This requires polling, as it is one-way only, despite many feature requests from the community for “pushing” of changes to external points.
The one exception I know of is HomeKit, presumably because Philips is not using the “public” API for that but rather something they did themselves, where they’re free to do whatever they want to make it work how they want. 
Currently we are doing polling in our HUE integration, but at a frequency where updates are perceived as instant and the load on CORE is imperceptible. We are still within HUE maximum calls/second. If there is a way to get updates pushed from HUE, we will probably switch to that at some point.