@chrishamm
the baby-step button wasn't slow because it was waiting, it was slow because it was animating, right?
I have to disagree with your assessment of the rest, which is why it's going to take forever for DWC to be useable.
I have built entire content management systems in a week long before all of these fancy libraries were around.
It sounds like you're relying on frameworks to be silver bullets. The notion that it is a PWA is misguided. Yes, we all want it on both desktop and mobile browsers, but going along with PWA methodology is a recipe for bloat and over complication.
I downloaded DWC1 source, added one JS library, and was able to turn it into a drag-n-drop re-arrange-able site in less than an hour.
I honestly think you're working too hard on it and not realizing that at it's essence, it's a ridiculously simple web site. It doesn't need anything fancy to be awesome.
This doesn't need to be a PWA, it needs to be control plane that can be layed out on desktop and mobile.
I guarantee you, based on your experience with the system, if you were to start from scratch, you could have something awesome in less than a week's time if you adopt the notion that you're building control panels for a machine, not a Progressive Web App. The site is only going to do so many things, and that so many, is very few. There are only a small handful of technical hurdles when it comes to working with the duet web-host, once those are knocked out, which you can do instantly, because you've done it before, it would take no time at all.