If you use 1" pipe the whole way you are creating a huge pressure loss, so each zone has to be much smaller to work so you need more valves and more heads. Valves are expensive. The more effective method is to begin with a larger main line that is always under pressure, actual size is to be calculated, and this main line goes as far as possible to get to each zone. Each zone has a valve that is normally closed. The cost of that is that each valve is somewhere out in the yard, or more likely, somewhere near the house or curb.
My controller is a Rainbird with something like 12 zones but I only use 9. It has a hookup for the RainClick sensor, pretty simple rain monitoring/shut off, when the little pad in the cup is wet it sits down and turns off. You just adjust the opening to get the drying out of the pad to agree with the drying out of the lawn. I dunno, as long as it is shut off when it is raining, and really raining not just a 1/4" dribble, I don't care, I've never adjusted it.
The most important thing with a sprinkler system is to check it really frequently. Maybe once a month. Run it to see if any of the pop-ups are not fully up -- grass or rocks can keep them partway down then the water can cut out the o-ring. Then you get gushing around the head. You need to see that the head cap on a popup is not leaking too much, again an o-ring in there can be cleaned or tightened or replaced. Most important, you need to know that the spray pattern is good, not too much or too little, and be certain that the top has not blown off. Seems I see that really often around here, a sprinkler running with one head blown off, shooting water 12' into the air and the owner has no idea. That happens if you run the system pre-dawn and never look at it running. Or the head near the driveway is run over and broken, gushing water when no one sees. You install a flexible connection so that those heads can move a bit, then add a concrete ring to help protect them.
When you change the landscaping you may need to redo the design. It is tempting to just let it be the same but you really ought to redesign it to run correctly. We are suffering here now because the prior owner did not rework the sprinkler when major landscaping was done. I have heads that water stacks of rocks, popups that are too tall or not tall enough for what is there now, a real chore to dig up and replace after all the borders and dirt and plants are in place. I've been converting what I can over to drip parts but that mixes outputs and affects how the rest of the zone acts so not really a great solution. I have no idea where the lines are under all the flagstone. They really cheaped out when they didn't rework the system then.