i thought the developer experience gap was bad until i had to wire together a DSLR, teleprompter, teleprompter display, mic and lighting. how has someone not packaged all of this up in a single vendor solution yet?

There is so much room for improvement in video tech. You should chat with @aaronpk about his work to streamline live streaming of videos at conferences and on the fly editing. There are a lot of fiddly bits which he worked out into a nice package for himself, but it was not easy.