its good timing, maybe, as I'm finishing up a convenience library for the ESP8266 (eventually for esp32 but I have tons of wemos d1 minis and they are the new jellybean, it seems).
if anyone wants to have an early review snapshot of my wifi api, let me know. its goal is to reduce the work on the apps devel when they need basic ip services for the ESP chips. to me, basic services are: wifi-manager (portal mode, so you can reconfig its wifi parms), NTP, http, mdns, OTA and maybe some other things I forgot. it gets you up and running with basic IP and webserver, keeps NTP up to date and keeps an OTA thread running so you can update it via usual wifi/esptool.
I kind of like the idea of things being on the network and each node doing a simple thing, with a controller sending messages to the slaves, with all of them being on the network and all of them being OTA updatable.
I found that websockets actually work pretty well if fast streams need to be sent between cooperating nodes.
one thing I dont like is that putting so many 2.4ghz's so close to each other is just not good practice. but this is DIY, I never heard of FCC before (what's that?) and well, ....
is that too complex for folks? I admit its distributed, but its easy to run out of speed on small chips like this and so I plan ahead so that if more nodes need to be added, they can, and the message passing stuff will still work.