> To my mind their mistake was not having an open source library that could work with their capture format, including basic support for focusing and producing an output image for display.

Oh, now you are making me wistful for what might have been.

If they'd had any kind of library or API, I could have played around with my Ken Burns idea by writing a few lines of code!

I've seen this same mistake over and over again going back to the earliest days of GUI apps: designing the user experience with hardcoded interactions instead of building the UI on top of a public API that enables others to create and experiment with their own interactions.