Anyone else suffer z-wave distance woes?

I have been very disappointed in the distance between z-wave sensors and repeaters.

I live in a house with brick internal walls so I expect some signal attenuation from the published 30m inside a house - but I really did not expect z-wave distances to be so very short between devices. I can only get reliable communications within about 5 m and even then, they have to be pretty much line of sight to work correctly.

I put my Zipabox in various locations around my house and I have found that the z-wave radio network does not seem to be able to penetrate through two brick walls to another room.

I have tried repeaters (on/off mains switches) and they do improve things as expected by it seems totally wrong that I need a repeater in every room for the z-wave system to work.

I wanted to use z-wave sensors for an alarm system but I have found that the z-wave network is simply too unreliable to be used as the basis of an alarm system.

I have a hunch that I'll need to purchase a security module or two and hard wire sensors up to that to get the sort of reliability needed for an alarm system.

Since I need repeaters in every room to keep up the mesh, all a burglar would need to do is pull the main fuse from the electricity meter and the entire z-wave network will collapse.

Has anyone else had experience with this major flaw in the z-wave network system?