It's always good to have someone with the subject matter experience in the discussions.
getting paid the right amount if someone buys something from your link is much more the intractable problem.
I think the obscure nature of the aggregated referral systems are the main reason for that, Then again there are reputed brands who offer affiliate links for their products themselves but don't even offer a affiliate dashboard! We just have to take their word for it when it comes conversion figures and payments.
This is why I feel an independent neutral entity which provides a unified referral system could address these problems, Where only the advertiser is required to perform a technical integration and the publisher gets paid by publicly verifiable metrics(There are laws in some countries to disclose affiliate links anyways).