The 'Wild West' of vinyl is an interesting 'What If' question and an example of variances of evolutionary paths compared to, say, cassette and CD.
More mature, tightly engineered formats (cassette, CD, etc) seem to have come about more nicely uniform when you had a combination of electronics companies that also owned record labels (e.g. Philips & Sony both made electronics gear, and owned record labels). So there was a built-in unification of the media and playback electronics in a single corporate entity.
But in the early days of LP, it wasn't like that...the record companies were all doing their own independent thing, even making their own LPs with variances in playback EQ (Decca, RCA, Louisseau-Lyre, etc.).
Then you had oddball things like 16" transcription disks used for broadcasts:
It's a wonder it all worked.
I think it shows that vinyl is like the Kalashnikov AK-47 of the audio world -- a lot can be 'wrong', and dirty with gunk, but still operational and usable.