Even with a modern short-arc lamp and an electronic ballast, you can get a little whiff of ozone when the lamp starts, I'm not sure what the mechanism is.
Carbon arc was definitely a whole different ball game. I'd think the fixtures were filtering at least most of it, or else everyone on set would have pretty much the same problems as someone doing arc welding without a mask and sleeves in short order.
"Film lights" are pretty likely to be 5kW+ arc lamps. Lighting fixtures definitely include filters to keep the UV out of the beam, but film still loves giant HMI fresnels.
If you're ever interested in publishing anything about this to aid others in recreating it, I'm sure there'd be ample interest (for better or worse). Professional controllers are hilariously expensive for many hobbyists and the options for DIY control surfaces tend to be limited (especially with motorized faders).
I'd certainly be interested in reading about how it works, even without anything approaching build documentation.
You'd be surprised what kind of terrible things can happen on a run of DMX cable. I've seen enough transceivers exploded out of their sockets to be wary. The leading US manufacturer of lighting controls continues to use socketed DIP rs-485 transceivers exactly because they tend to take hits and fail.
The biggest benefit, in my opinion, of doing puzzles is building pattern recognition. If that obvious dumb guess is consistent for the structure presented in the difficult-but-guessable puzzle, then I think there's still value to doing it.
Shooting RAW gives you much more freedom to choose how a photo will be processed than letting the camera make some set of default choices about color rendering so it can spit out a JPG.
A current limiting resistor isn't ideal for LEDs bright enough for home lighting. It's not very efficient compared to a proper constant-current LED driver. Losing the terrible power supplies in most LED lamps wouldn't be a bad thing, though.
There are specific locations where I lose signal extremely consistently. Like the right-turn lane of a road near my office. No bridge, no particularly tall buildings - just a small spot where the radio cuts out every time.