the state machine is a very powerful construct - don't think its an unnecessary burden.

i used to directly transceive a secure radio datastream in 8085 (years ago) processor background. it allowed us to avoid all typical biasing toward chr/msg frame sizes, uarts, binary encoding etc.

In its simplest form (for illustration), the state machine is an interrupt that uses an ONGOTO instruction to pickup the current or next step in the process by reading a soft vector (the state).

duh