Thank you for the comprehensive reply. I don’t use the SketchUp plugin for editing or creating geometries so I was not aware of these issues. OpenStudio SketchUp plugin is no more funded and the issues that you mentioned most likely won’t get fixed. They are now working on a 2D editor for OpenStudio. If you want to keep using SketchUp and alternative is Euclid which is actually the OpenStudio legacy plugin. It’s simpler and only generates idf files instead of osm. Big Ladder is supporting the development and I assume they will fix bugs if you report them.
In any case, after reading your thoughts here, if you decided to use Honeybee for your class be aware of this issue with OpenStudio. We haven’t seen the issue to happen for OpenStudio 2.3 but it was an issue before for some users. It is one of those issues that we (Ladybug Tools developers) can’t do much about it. The issue is related to OpenStudio C# bindings and dependencies. OpenStudio team has helped us a number of times to figure out the source of the problem and we believe it was because of dependencies and is solved but you never know!
If your use of Honeybee will mostly be only creating the geometry and you won’t set up the HVAC systems then EnergyPlus component will be the safe choice. I also should say that going forward with Honeybee[+] we most likely only support OpenStudio route but that will only happen when we ensure the PINVOKE issue is gone and users won’t face unexpected bugs.