The CC1101's proved just as unreliable as the AM system.  Most of the time, there was a long delay.  Sometimes it would never receive until pressing many times or moving to another position.  As the 1st attempt at powering a radio up with every button press, it was pretty bad. 

The bathroom light was far more reliable for some reason.  Maybe it was being farther from other gadgets.  Maybe it was the simpler code.

Going back to IR would make it totally worthless.  An LED went in the router to indicate CC1101 reception.

That showed the 433Mhz radios were bulletproof & the wifi for desk 1 in particular was dying.  Pinging it to keep it alive made no difference.  The button has to be pressed multiple times to get it to go.  It shouldn't since it's UDP.  There were theories that desk 1 was flashed with broken firmware.

Managed to observe it responding to pings while not taking UDP desk commands, so the problem narrowed down to the desk firmware.

It finally ended up being the 0xff of the ADC being confused for the 0xff start code.  It was a use case for byte stuffing.

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The idea occurred to salvage the original transmitter's 8 button board & go back to the original form factor.  It would allow a bigger battery & more importantly spread the buttons apart while keeping the narrower caps, like a 1980's remote control.  The current buttons are too crammed for a clumsy old lion.  1 button would enable the stepping mode.  Implementing the stepping mode would be a buster.