There is nothing wrong in promoting CPLDs, FPGAs and similar complicated stuff (I think the PSD/uPSD-s fall into this groop, too); but, having in mind that most of what we write up here is intended to newbies, simply quoting the price of the chip is misleading. For a newbie, the cost of the tools (yes, even the "free" tools, they are usually tens of megabytes which has nonzero cost to download) and maybe more importantly the lack of knowledge is simply prohibitive to use them. This is not to say they shouldn't attempt to learn something new, but the gap is too big to be leapt over easily enough.

This is also in an answer to many of Jez's posts promoting an FPGA-based solution to several problems, I always wanted to write it down but was lazy most of the times... :-O

JW