"I found that with limited resourses such as found in 8052 systems its all too easy to get carried away with comms stacks which tie up the processor.It is better to do as much as possible at the physical layer(CRC,error correction etc and so on) in hardware so that you can keep the higher levels of the stack looking at the OSI model for example,as nice and tight little functions."

Agreed, mostly. It is easy to get carried away. It has taken me quite some time to come up with a nice combination that suits the majority (not all) of these types of projects I am involved with. Those projects tend to be small, low cost, low power, battery-operated devices. I'm exaggerating, but you could almost visualize them as having a battery and an MCU with a wire antenna on a pin. Extra hardware to do CRC's or error correction is out of the question.

Layer boundaries sometimes move around a bit (e.g., CRC calculation sometimes in the PHY layer, sometimes in the DLP layer) according to the nature of the project. But then CRC's are not necessarily a big instruction hog anyway. Error correction (e.g., Reed-Solomon) is an entirely different matter!

Congrats on the new job! Still in the technical field, I hope, and not just flippin' burgers :-)