First, sorry for getting off on the wrong foot here with this – we by no means mean to be insulting you, just as, I’m assuming with your quotes above, you weren’t trying to insult us. It’s hard to tell the inflection of tone/voice via written words, so I think that’s where the communication breakdown occured.
Anyway, let’s start fresh. It sounds like this is what you’re after, correct:
I’m guessing what you want to do here is hold up on the paddle and your Zigbee bulbs will dim up in realtime and when you hold down on the paddle, they will dim down in realtime (or as close to realtime as they can since they are technically wireless).
If that’s my correct interpretation, to my knowledge I’m not sure it will work on SmartThings in that way. However, maybe @prjct92eh2 and/or @jody know of a way to do this.
There are a couple of threads discussing this for Hubitat (I know you’re on ST, but I at least wanted to show you that it is possible to do what you’re asking) but again, even on Hubitat, there will be a slight delay.
So, as a workaround as Eric and @kreene1987 have suggested, we’ve put together a couple other options for you for non-Z-Wave type bulbs as outlined in the SmartThings links above.
Hopefully that helps clear up some things for you and again, apologies for the misunderstanding – let’s just figure this out for you and/or try to work towards a solution.
For my own help, where can we be more clear about the limitations and/or implications of how switches work with bulbs? I wrote up a bunch of Knowledge Base articles, but maybe people don’t look there? Honest question – one of my goals has always been to try to be as clear as possible (sometimes to a fault), so I’m curious where we can improve.