Well for starters I sometimes think that the argument "if you have nothing to hide" should only be uttered by people without curtains, fences, or door locks, but ultimately privacy is a personal issue and on that point we just didn't want to participate on the level that smart meters can and will be implemented. Take for instance, your fridge. It has a chip that passes the info of how often and when you open the doors while new units will (or perhaps already do at this point) have product readers giving detailed info of what and how much you have and when you consume it. That info will be sold to competing companies so they can target you with ads for their products or given to your health insurance providers so they can approve of your diet with regards to your health benefits. It's just creepy. It's like having a peeping tom staring at you, literally, all the time. lol It also smacks of being watched over like an errant child. More and more our lives are being controlled by a bureaucracy of "experts" and "authorities" that have a parental complex.
As for being grid-tied, for me it's like feeding the beast that's killing us all. The power you'd produce isn't going to go back into your community, it's going to be sold off for profit and used for more of the same infrastructure that's grinding the world up into plastic bits, or worse things like the military industrial complex while algorithms will constantly make the power you want to use more expensive and limited. The whole world is being tied together so that power from one hemisphere can be transferred to another and we'd be on the bottom of that list over industry. Not only is there a move for a one world government but a one world power grid and I'm not comfortable with being a part of either. Until such times that there are no more armies chugging across the oceans doing manoeuvres and occupying countries, and until there are no more cars being produced, oceans with dead zones, rockets blasting through our atmosphere, or forests being flattened, then I just want to limit my participation in what this civilization does as much as possible. As far as I'm concerned any benefits of grid-tied is just green washing the truth and a sinister form of manipulation and control.
Now if my neighbours wanted to join forces and create a network of houses sharing power that would be ideal, but not likely here. Too bad since my generator can charge up a couple of houses at once when the batteries can't get enough from the PV system.
There are personal and environmental health issues that concern us as well with smart meters and their infrastructure, and again, we just didn't want to participate or contribute to those as well.
