Ben,
I think it depends on what people are using the plug in for. I think if people are only using the plugins for notifications, other than security of course, that increasing the polling interval is fine up to a point of maybe a minute or even longer.
If people are using siri to text their house commands to do things, then the polling interval makes sense to be shorter so you have a shorter lag between commands.
That's why I was thinking controlling this variable within the device would make sense... you could schedule the polling, say maybe every 30 minutes at night if you're not using it for security, vs. every 10 seconds during the day when you may be controlling with text commands.
I realize that this adds a lot more to the complexity of this "quick fix"