I understand. However, I've had very similar experiences with industrial cameras and sensors in a research setup.

Taking snapshots was ok, once you had setup everything (it only worked with GigE Network cards supporting jumbo packets and some other specific settings) and used their "acquisition" software (which could be automated). However, triggering multiple cameras at once at the exact same time was a similar experiences with additional trigger lines and multiple discussions with the manufacturers application engineers.

Even worse where non standard sensors line photosynthesis sensors or other industrial sensors used in a non standard setup. For the lidar I also had to read their hundreds of pages long documentation of their serial interface but send it via TCP in special packets which had almost no documentation. Depending on the command the byte order also had to be swapped which was not documented at all and I had to find it by trial and error.

For a different laser sensor that produces point clouds there was a simple interface to get preprocessed images but we wanted the raw point cloud data which also required to download the files from an on-device FTP server which also required so some guess work.

Later I worked in industrial settings with PLCs and these guys sometimes also go overboard with complex setups (I'm looking at you, Siemens RFID reader...)

So I'm not sure if it's the military grade that makes it such an experience. Industrial grade seems like a similar experience. I guess a lot of consumer devices also do shit like that under the hood but hide it in firmware and drivers.