Hamilton Morris and his stuff on clandestine chemistry is super interesting in this domain. Sometimes the chemistry is straight forward but access to certain chemicals is hard, so the procedure must change based on what's available not necessarily what's ideal
The music industry works the way it does because a large amount of people involved are effectively working for free. Promoters, photographers, DJs, interns, writers, assistants, even some artists early on accept low or unpaid work because the industry offers networking, access, drugs, etc
I've seen the same devs refuse to use a library because the last commit was 3 months ago, despite the library being extremely popular, battle tested, and existing for 10 years.