How hard would it be to make a hot shoe mount for the iPhone? Snap the phone into the mount and slip it into the shoe.
The hard part would be designing he connector. The PC socket has only two pins. The iPhone has 25 or 30.
How many of those pins are really needed to dock the iPhone? Probably not all of them. However, the part that takes some technical know-how is deciding which ones are needed for the particular application at-hand.
Once that has been done, machine a hole in the camera at the appropriate location, either in the front where the PC socket is or, maybe in the side of the camera. Wherever there is space. You would probably have to disassemble the camera down to the chassis in order to do the work.
The camera Mister Pischer-geek used was a Pentax Super Program, I believe. (The model I use for my "everyday" camera.) From what I know, there isn't a lot of room inside the camera. He might be able to cram the wires and connector in there, if he tried.
What about a TLR? There's lots of room inside many of those. Carefully done, there are possibilities for completing the task and keeping both the old and the new working.
Instead, this kid who has little concept of what he's doing, doesn't know how to accomplish what he's doing and has little work ethic to support his ideas, forges ahead and destroys things in order to look cool.
I have seen historic tall ships that have modern electronic navigational gear hidden inside so that you would never know it was there. The antenna cables were all hidden in the mast rigging so you can't tell them apart from the regular rigging. If you don't look closely at the antenna a the top of the mast, it would look like a lightning rod.
I know a guy whose hobby is running vintage steam engines. He has installed electronic tachometers, temperature and pressure gauges in boilers so that he can track the engine's operation on his computer screen. When he exhibits at the steam shows (county fairs) he neatly hides his laptop computer and the cables behind a stack of wood or a bail of hay. You'd never know it was there.
Guys who do this kind of geekery take their craft seriously. They would take one look at this kid's work and say, "No! Wrong, wrong wrong!"
How about this for an idea?
Somehow connect the camera's shutter button to the camera trigger on the iPhone. When you take a photo with the camera, the iPhone takes a picture simultaneously.
You would capture a digital image for uploading, reference and for geotagging at the same time you took a picture on film.
If you could do that, you would be Lord, God and King of the Über-geeks!