There are almost no supported zigbee devices on the vera so it actually takes a bit a of work to configure the unsupported zigbee devices on the vera. I actually have 0 vera supported devices and managed to make them all work. Once configured properly, they worked very well.
Two threads of interest from which you could get inspirations
As for zwave, it really should be easier and more universal. Unfortunately there has been a bit too many non ordinary devices which became popular and so the vera has gone down the path of customizing configurations too much causing many devices, even officially supported ones to fail and rendering the list completely useless. In that case too, I ran for a long time with less than half of my devices being supported and they were working just fine. I only had a few I ended having to give up on and they were all officially supported except for one.
Not sure what will happen with the new eZLO products but the bar is set so low, it can only be better.