That’s just how research works most of the time. The experimental setup required to build a working prototype and prove the initial hypothesis is always going to be larger and more complex than a mass market appliance. If that appliance ever gets built depends on a huge number of factors too. If the process scales as expected, how complex the device is to produce and if a company thinks that it can make money on it. The researchers, meanwhile, are probably more worried about their next grant funding.
The only option I can think of would be to use a vm. Unless all your apps support restoring sessions, I don’t think there’s any mechanism to do so globally. Getting stuff to start automatically or as a group using a script is easy enough, but that’s less than half your problem as you’ve described it.