I’ve just spent a little while looking at HyperControl, sadly as opposed to some other “smart” MIDI protocols it hasn’t been documented much nor was it reverse engineered. The Python scripts from Ableton Live do tell us how to engage it using SysEX though! My guess is that it’s like most other similar proprietary protocols, it’s just some undocumented SysEX to/from the host software. Given the Air Mini32 doesn’t have infinite/relative-mode knobs I don’t think there’s much to get from it except what the normal MIDI mode will allow.
Multiple MIDI devices is still relevant though, thanks for the suggestion!
Edit:
I would have picked Python if it was easier but there are currently known bugs notably with multiple interpreters running in parallel. More details here, I worked on embedding pypy (a faster Python interpreter) and got good results but sadly all of that was lost when my computer was stolen last year.
In the end, I don’t regret going for Lua mostly because it is really fast and efficient. I wanted to guarantee the best performance even with the most complex scripts, ie. ModScript isn’t made for prototyping, I want it to be trusted by musicians performing live using several controllers.
The engine used is called LuaJIT and although I do not understand the details, it is generally regarded as one of the fastest and often considered the fastest scripting engine.