If your devices are bound to an old or broken controller, you can rescue your devices by putting a zwave controller into exclusion mode near the device and triggering exclusion on the device (how to do this is device specific, but it usually means "pressing whatever switch the device has"). Note that this is different than what many devices call a reset, which usually doesn't fully reset the device.

Exclusion mode should work on all zwave devices, because they have been certified as zwave compliant with the zwave alliance. The problem is that exclusion mode is extremely counter intuitive. Here is what you need to know:

1. Any zwave controller can exclude a device from any network. It does NOT have to be the controller for that network.

2. The controller needs to be near the device, as other devices won't forward the exclusion messages... at least I think this part is true.

So to rescue your device, you can plug a zwave controller into your laptop and walk around your house excluding devices. I wrote a blog post on how to do this: https://notes.bayesup.date/How+I+Made+a+Mobile+Z-Wave+Exclus.... There are some USB zwave controllers that have a built-in battery specifically so you can do this without involving your laptop.

Anyway, this is so poorly designed I suspect many devices have been thrown away in frustration even though they could have been saved. I almost did this to over $1,000 in zwave switches until I figured out how to write the freaking exclusion program myself and walk around with my laptop.