26 chips must be a nightmare when it comes to pcbs and reliability,the obvious answer and the one we have all heard before is to use a cpld to hold all the glue logic and provide you with as many i/o ports as you are willing to pay for.The drawback with that approach is that with larger cplds manufctures are moving towards pga and bga packages which are a pain as discussed elsewhere.Although I have this week succesfully placed and routed a 144 pin plcc device without much trouble.
Tha advantage is you can use 3.3 volt logic cpld with 5 volt tolerant i/o