I realized my (own) sibling comment sounded like a bunch of rhetorical questions, since they were asked from the standpoint of my skepticism/suspicion based on what I read.

However, they actually are questions, and I'd appreciate knowing the answers (or best approximations) from an insider.

The wikipedia doesn't provide much insight into the technical underpinnings to draw any conclusions.

Perhaps there's something of an answer to the OC's general question, just in this inscrutability: the details are so foreign/unique but so important that software/computer people would have no intuition on how or where their skills would fit.