Well, I was impressed with your low level electronics hack just the same.
I'm so Old-Skool, I predate most of the schools.
I used to program down to the bare iron, literally punching hex into a PROM programmer for early chips like the Z80 and 6800. Made a living writing microcode for large swaths of 2901 bipolar ALUs. Lots of fun, as each and every etch in bipolar had to be terminated with a unique pull-up resistor value to avoid ringing on that etch. The illusion of "digital" was revealed by the physics of high speed to be very illusory.
I am far more comfortable with a hardware hack than a "child device".
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Completely agree. I have a slightly different setup - my neighbors are a lot closer. But I have an Ademco panel professionally installed and monitored and I use Envisalink to tie it into HE. If HE falls over, my alarm panel continues to function and be monitored. Some of the fancy stuff won't work (like all my house lights will not blink if the fire alarm goes off) but the security system continues to function as it was designed.
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Weren't we all more tolerant of that kind of failing back in the X10 days. Expectations of HA reliability should be much higher ... just not having to worry about nursing this stuff anymore is my "fancy" goal.
Ditto, except that I had a four-hour ride each way to burn the chip...and hope for no mistakes!
For what it's worth, my high school PROM was a 2708..... 
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