PS I will give two examples. of why I think 4 is more important then the tool. Back in 99 I was looking for a remote for the Tandberg VC system, I decided to try the Pronto and it looked to work. The original remote only had 3 discrete preset buttons and you could access the other 7 using preset + # (or something like that). In the manual for the system it said the system could have up to 16 of them and they could be used discretely. I asked my Rep who was from Tandberg to get the info, but eventually he came back to me that he could not. Luckily there was a good document describing Pronto HEX in the library here and I used to decipher and create all possible codes and found them using the manual process (create a button for each code, a piece of paper with a table, press 1 & write down effect, press 2 & write down effect.....

knowing from the manual that those codes existed helped a lot (motivation) but the problem was I could not get a hint from them where to look because the info was not readily available.

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about a year ago I looked at a Christie Projector, due to the way we make our installs monitors have multiple duties and so I needed to make sure I could get easily to the different inputs. I send them an e-mail and got a nice answer back, something like no idea but here is a spreadsheet with some codes for our other projectors. So again (luckily this time the paper had that they used NEC codes and so making the list was easier) and did the trial and error and found the codes I needed. It ended up taking a long time , but the codes were there. If they would have been readily available the job would be done in seconds.