I believe that the addressable lights are worth the extra money, once you have the addressable lights, you can turn them into something very helpful and very pretty. For example, this year we (are working on making it so we) have lights that display our shooter speed. You can't really do that with the analog ones, it's much easier to tell if all of the LEDs are green instead of white than to tell if they are the correct shade of green. About the I2C, we have been working on it and I created a document showing what we messed up and how to make it work,
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...HpYhygl2I/edit.