worlds unreconciled
Much of TV technology is suffering from being stuck in a no-man's land stuck between the worlds of IT, TV engineering and TV ownership and associated finance.
Many of the old world TV engineers initially rejected the early production control arrangements which were built on general purpose computers. In fact, they rejected pretty much anything which hadn't been built with massive redundancy and well-documented, graceful failure tendencies. So many of them never gained any experience with these platforms until they were forced to, late in the game.
Meanwhile, station owners and managers have been desperate to trim costs, and the last 10 years have created many ways to replace expensive dedicated hardware or humans with general purpose computers. For the people making these computer systems, they cut costs to be competitive with one another by using off-the-shelf windows and other components, just like the rest of the IT world.
So the new shape of hell involves old-school video engineers who don't trust the new kit and don't want anything to do with it and often refuse to take responsibility for it while retreating back to specialties not yet replaced by general purpose equipment. Management solves that problem by tossing IT whiz kids into the mix, and they typically have no understanding of a production schedule or the impact of a mis-timed update.
There you are, with the near-perfect storm where management literally can't afford to do it the old way with reliable dedicated gear and quality human talent. Yet it stumbles forward with two (often hostile) classes of engineers with different mindsets and operational priorities working to er, patch it together. Toss in a "free" installation of new robots by the vendor's own team and you can guarantee that the resident crew left to deal with it won't understand the cable markings or operational control.
As for the parking lot broadcast? It feels safe to guess that the studio had installed robotic cameras in the newsroom, and without a working control system or trained/rehearsed operators on staff, it probably made more sense to activate their emergency remote broadcast plan. Note that this would also clear the studio to give engineering more time to clean up for the 5pm.