I do not believe there is any longer a king to the degree that the Pronto PRO was. I am using a strategy similar to Dawn. I use my pronto pro remotes as the preferred TV control system in the master and guest bedrooms, the kitchen and to control the entire Home Theater.

The house is now controlled by Insteon switches with Z-Wave thermostats, so I installed a UDI ISY994 as the master controller. The ISY is completely controlled from my wall mounted iPads, my iPhone, and the Amazon echo systems ( 2 Echos, 2 Dots), so everything in the house, including all the TV systems are controllable by voice or IOS touch screens.

IR is/was always a challenge. I finally decided to resolve the issue for me at least. I have an RPi running a node.Javascript system to send commands to any of the Global Cache devices in the house handling all of that devices protocol. The program runs from simple TCP commands sent by any device on my network. There is a separate Windows app that will take various IR formats and convert them to what the program wants, GC format. A TCP command looks like
DOIR ,, As in
DOIR KItchen TV, Cisco stb 4200, Channal Up
Macros are also handled by a similar command, and response is instantaneous for all practical purposes.

I will make the code available to capable interested parties.

The decision to standardize on JavaScript in my HA work has helped a lot. I code the iPad's using the CommandFusion system which is very similar to what the pronto pro was. A good graphical design/development system coupled to a strong JavaScript engine with a set of functions to do what is needed to couple the screen to the code in a sensible manner. I code the RPi's in node.js on a Windows PC using visual studio community 2015. This allows me to do all my testing and debugging in Visual Studio of any JavaScript code using breakpoints, variable tracking, etc. I just copy the finished code to the final target.