Comment by ChuckMcM

Something that I appreciated was that when you had a setup for a particular task, all of the knobs and controls were in service of that task (for the most part). So you could put together a video editing station (which an acquaintance of mine did) but the extravagance was that it was this expensive gear that really did one thing well. While today you could put together a Raspberry Pi 5 setup to do video editing with all the knobs and controls of the switchers and editors back in the day, and it would be very affordable and just as functional.