Myself being a purist, I tend to lean towards simplicity.

To my knowledge, Peter Dowson still supports EPICINFO.. but only in parallel with major FS releases... Even so, I've never had any trouble getting EPICINFO to talk to virtually any "bit" in FSUIPC via EPIC.

Since you still need to learn some EPIC programming to use FSCOMM, you may as well go the extra 10 yards and learn it completely. I have never been a fan of additional layered software on top of an embedded system. The sole reason being if you encounter a problem, the more layers you add, the more complex your troubleshooting process will need to be and the more chances that something 'else' could be wrong. If you are just using EPIC, then it's a bug in your code.. period. You will encounter bugs in code regardless of what language/software you are using.

I'm not saying that FSCOMM isn't valuable or doesn't have a niche' market in the sim world, I'm only stating that if you know how to program switches and displays in EPIC, you have 90% of the EPIC battle won (No pun intended). EPICINFO is much easier to use than most would have us believe.... Since I've learned to use it effectively, I've not had any use to program joystick buttons or even go through the FS9.CFG file for anything. It all goes through EPIC.