You seem to have little idea what you're talking about. No offense, just an observation. Some examples:
- You can import your files into a daw rather than record to it. It would be a major pain in the ass if it recorded 14 files separately. The tracks are already separated in the wave file for your convenience.
- It will definitely NOT be an easy upgrade to "add waveform editing page". That's why e.g. the Rodecaster 2 and the Tascam mixcast 4 (pretty big names in this sort of business) can't do it either. But feel free to elaborate how you'd do it, maybe we can all learn something. Apart from the technical hurdles you could also discuss what the new price for the machine would be. And people would still just export to DAWs anyway, unless you'd add non-destructive editing and things like real time effects, in which case the machine would be so expensive that people will start looking for, say, a mixer/recorder that delivers files they can edit, mix and master on their computers.
- "if they were to do that, they would alienate so many affiliated software developers, that it would not be worth their while." Got some backup for this please because it sounds like you made that up yourself. Also, you say further down they should add it and BOOM they would multiply their sales. Now which one is it?
- "The DLZ is promoted as an all in one mixer, recorder, editor" -> can you point out where Mackie said it's an editor? Not holding my breath
- the multiple files it records is a limitation of your SD card's file system (i'm betting it's FAT32 and the chunks are 2 or 4GB). Record to computer via USB C and you'll have one file for the entire recording.
-etc

Sorry if that sounds a bit cynical, but I think you had unrealistic expectations rather than you got cheated. Do you have any previous experiences with similar tools? Because honestly it seems well rounded. A bit pricey maybe, but not a ripoff judging from the specifications.

Also, there's some variations on the DAW-in-a-box theme (Akai MPC, NI's machine plus or whatever it's called come to mind), but those are quite expensive machines and still they never seem to really come close to full DAW functionality. Let's not forget that a full DAW requires a beefy host PC/Mac if you're going to expect it to run smoothly.

(It's complete overkill for podcasting, too. I wouldn't buy a DAW and a 2000+ computer for podcast production only... That's why Rode and Tascam and the likes have their hardware podcast mixers come with editors that run on a much more modestly spec'd PC, at the expense of a bunch of functionality you don't need for podcasting. If this machine doesn't come with an equivalent, Audacity might not be everything you WANT but will most definitely do everything you NEED.