Supposedly, some of these are scams. But DirecTV admitted to hiring Telecel Marketing Solutions to place robocalls. There have been multiple class-action lawsuits against AT&T for such things.
It's bizarre that AT&T would sabotage the usefulness of their own customers' telephone service, but this is a bizarre world.
Lua appeals to my sensibilites and I want to make use of it. It seems to be a well-designed language and it has a very performant JIT. But a big weakness for non-embedded use cases seems to be its ecosystem. A recent little project I wanted to use Lua on included a sqlite database, oldschool 3DES encryption, and an SMTP client. For many languages, there would be a clearly mob-approved library for each of these. But I found 3 or 4 possibilities to use sqlite in Lua, with no clear winner. I ended up using Ruby instead.
While what you went through and felt is valid, I was able to find, in LuaRocks, libraries or Lua interfaces to libraries implementing everything on that wish list. In more detail:
In my limited experience, when you want to interact with C libraries, you often end up reading the docs of the original C library anyway because often the bindings are nearly 1:1 - and often the trouble lies in the word "nearly".
Just writing yourself the bindings you actually need is most likely the best approach.
It should be relatively easy to do, because by using something like Lua you goal is precisely to expose functionalities implemented by your language as Lua functions (otherwise you would just convert them into dynamic library functions and use a classic glue language with a decent FFI to connect them).
This is the value proposition of an embeddable scripting language at heart.
It's bizarre that AT&T would sabotage the usefulness of their own customers' telephone service, but this is a bizarre world.