Hello,
I have experience with communication protocols (Modbus, MBus, EnOcean, Lonworks), embedded systems (RPi, ESP8266), SCADA systems, binary and hex data processing.
I'm also an experienced Linux user and network administrator.
Regarding coding I'm mostly doing Python but I have experience with C as well.
I had an ESP8266 a while ago and I used MicroPython on it so we could use it for yours as well. While there are MBus libraries for Python I don't think we could use them on the ESP8266 as they depend on the libmbus library.
However if we manage to get some MBus data on the ESP8266 we can see how to decode it afterwards.
Best wishes,
iticus