People need to remember that setting up no hardware or software system is ever foolproof or easy enough.

People need to test things and become comfortable with new things away from gigs, preferable not in front of the client, where the vagaries of this stuff are gone through.

It doesnt even have to be complex hardware that can cause a lot of problems.

Cabling problems, wrong connectors, wrong pinouts, wrong cable assumptions, cause as many problems as pci cards.
This has been the case throughout my entire time in this industry.

On Jerry Springer the musical. we were trying for days and days to communicate with an NEC projector to open and close the shutter.

I tried everything. In the end i discovered that the installation had not been carried out correctly, and the cable to the projector just didnt work and had never worked.

I assumed the installer 'would have tested this...' stupid me. They just ran a 100ft 'rs232' ( mike ) cable to the projector with no buffering without testing whether it was going to work.

I did all the right things, including plugging directly into the projector, but this was fraught with difficulty as the projector was not easy to get to and required technicians.
And the projector settings were nearly always unreadable as there was no easy screen.
Projector documentation was as confusing and old as it always is - normally from a model that was discontinued 3 years ago.