I recently tried to figure out where DALYs come from.
After a bit of searching, the best I could find was this report on the origin of the metric (the first Global Burden of Disease assessment). The report includes this explanation:

And:

But I'm left with many other questions:
- How many health workers were consulted?
- Were people other than health workers consulted, especially people who have themselves experienced the relevant health issues?
- Were DALY values updated in successive instances of the GBD?
- Are transcripts of any of these "formal exercises" available somewhere?
Ideally, I'd love to find a document/video that covers DALYs in the style of a factory tour video; I want to know what goes into them, who is involved, and what the creation process looks like.
Does anyone know of such a resource, and/or the answers to any of my questions?
Thanks for the link! I was aware of the most recent study, but you prompted me to dig deep and see what they said about their survey methodology.
The most relevant bits I found were sections 4.8 and 4.8.1 in this PDF, which describe multiple surveys done across a bunch of countries.
I'm still not sure where to find actual response counts by country or demographic data on respondents — it's easy to find tons of data on how different health issues are ranked and how common they are, but not to find a full "factory tour" of how the estimates were put together. I'd still be interested in more data on those points (I have to imagine it's buried somewhere in those 1800 pages).