Definitely not budget friendly for home hacking like this, but the tooling in those ecosystems is incredibly impressive.
The interface is horrible, the feedback on the control surfaces is extremely slow, I don't want to see my meters and faders update at an ~1Hz rate...
Added to that is the licensing costs to actually be allowed to change the DSP routing in the thing which makes me want to replace it with opensource software :)
Yeah, and for a variety of reasons have always failed to take off in the pro-audio/live-sound/music creation context. Still not entirely clear why this is, other than that apparently most of the people involved in those sort of workflows don't actually value "design your own DSP and run it in this little black 1U rack mount unit".
- it takes away one parameter for product differentiation
- testing all possible configurations is hard
- it becomes hard to tell whether a fault is your responsibility or the responsibility of the user
- support will become more important. Support for complicated things is expensive
- mechanical I/O is typically one of the biggest cost factors in such products. If you want to support all possible I/O scenarios that is going to be a lot of connectors and thus prohibitively expensive
- most customers will rather buy the mixer can do a lot than the multipurpose device that can be forced to be a mixer
All in all there are not that many advantages for manufacturers.
That being said, I run an Extron DMP 128 Plus with Dante at work. It is basically a 128bit channel mixer on 1HE with a ton of powerful DSP and many ways to control the DSP (RS-233, Telnet, Http, Web UI, ...)
But it is not the cheapest device out there.
As nerds we tend to only look at the specs and get bored when it comes to how the product is marketed and supported but this is a huge factor in development of these products. If they don't have clear obvious use cases they will be much much harder to sell. We are maybe 1% of the marketplace, the difference in revenues between 1% market coverage and 90% is massive, hardly anyone can run a business making perfect products for 1% of market
Live audio and production environments instead need to cater for changing acoustics and requirements on the order of seconds, minutes, or hours. There's a lot for dynamism required, and are often being interacted with by multiple people which warrants a different approach. Endless customisation here can be a hinderance rather than benefit.
A modern digital console is absolute chockers with user tweakable DSP though. Venues may also have some racked up DSP's running speaker processing with a console in front. There's no hard line, just different tools built for different needs.