Like I said, I understand the pain of interfacing with legacy hardware but I thought his solution demonstrated perfectly why we don't need a parallel port any more. I didn't mean to imply that OP was complaining about the lack of a parallel port and I enjoyed his post very much.
Two issues you are completely ignoring are "barrier to entry" and "PITA factor".
I can control a bunch of LPT-attached LEDs with two lines of shell script or bitbang SPI/1W/whatever with a screenful of C. No reason to design one-off PCBs and make those external devices "smarter" than they need to be.
