I totaly agreed with what you have mentioned. I am a Electrical Engineering in Power System.
But the problem is, the 29 VAC is the true-RMS, measure by Fluke Multimeter, not the cheap one:)
The primary voltage is 123VAC.
And also, as measuring the output of transfomer, I measured in both situation: no load and with load.
The best scenario I got is using 100 ft CAT5e, connected to my 13w camera, the end terminal voltage will drop to 26.7, which is fine. But if I change to CNB VCM-24VF, which only requrie 3w (=very low current), the voltage drop will be less than that. I did not try it.