You make good points MJMP, and I do hope I'm not so proud as too change my mind when good arguments come into play
That C compiler might be nice. I see it has its own IDE as well. I must admit I went with SDCC because that's what MIDIBOX advises. Also the other compilers I've looked at were all free/open source, so MikroC wasn't one of them.
That being said, out of curiosity I had a look at the program I wrote for my board, and it's 175 kbytes. And that's without even the core of the MIDIBOX software there, so we might get a surprise regarding the actual amount of code that your project requires.
Your point on the various families of PICs is very valid. But I used a 18F4620, which is still very basic, kind of like a Z80, but the most frustrating was the way it accesses memory, I also had to be wary of the executable size which is pretty limited on my PIC. The rest was mostly ok. I don't think you need much power anyway (except to do fancy stuff for playing with the expression pedals curves).
I understand your pain dealing with C, but as my daily job involves programming in C++, this is not daunting to me, and I appreciate the power of the language compared to Basic. But if you can get useful libraries it's still doable. In my opinion though, the executable produced with a Basic compiler would be much slower and bigger than the equivalent written in C/C++, and that is something to consider with PIC chips.
I did start with Basic when I was very young though, it's a nice and easy first step into programming.
All that being said, "if it works for you, then it's the right tool". Did I mention that I'm a software engineer? That may shed some light on my stance...
Anyway, as for the hardware, which is clearly not my field of expertise, all I can say is that I used cascaded 74HC165 chips, and that's only because it's what the MIDIBOX project is using.. I'm pretty lost when it comes to finding the right chip for an electronics project. I understand the basics of datasheets (part of my education, where I studied a wee bit in electronics) but that's about all. I don't know how to go about finding out a chip to get a job done.
While I'm at it, a word on the power supply. You're probably more aware of this than I, but using a 780x voltage regulator turned out to be a bad idea, because with the various LEDs and the LCD display, the current drawn makes the regulator go very hot, even with a heatsink attached. So I had to swap that for a chip I found on ebay, it takes almost the same space and the same pinouts as a 780x. I suspect it's just a cleverly packaged circuit using more traditional circuit (I cannot remember the chips involved right now, sorry!), not using a switching technique. That works well. Why did I use that obscure chip, you may ask? Because I didn't want to make a whole new PCB board just to change the power section (I'm lazy, I tell you!).
All this was so long ago! It appears I have not documented my project as well as I should have! Anyway, if you have more questions I'll be happy to oblige. Just remember that I'm a software guy, not a hardware guy