Maybe everybody is getting tired out by this chit.
Possibly there were overly grandiose visions for the physical plant and those millions went to someone’s “favored contractor” brother in law who promptly snorted it all up his nose and went kaput.
In this day when similar paraphernalia is common in the twisted sex world, it might or might not shock like it did in olden days. You’d need a psychoanalyst to answer that kind of question. But man’s inhumanity to man is always a fascinating subject, whether in war or slavery, or whether it’s theologians gone south or government gone off the rails. Animated scenes are very easy to do with today’s technology and to show in motion what slavery would have looked like, would grab jillions of eyeballs. You almost wouldn’t even need anything authentic, simply a scholarly good reproduction of it.