Much of my stuff is interconnected with other gizzmos via serial
connections (RS232, RS485 etc) and I have to write bit-bashing code for
the small parts. This eats into the limited RAM and cycles and must be
scheduled by the timer interrupt if you want to do much else.

Nirvana for me is a modified 16C84 with:

20 pin skinny = 16C84 + rx and tx pins.
On-chip UART
More on-chip data EEPROM (maybe 256 bytes rather than 64 bytes)
A bit more RAM (128 bytes?)

A 28 pin variant of the above with 8 more IO pins would also be major
cool! While I'm being greedy, maybe this beast could have 2k program
memory.

I really think that the small PICs (16x) are great in their niche. I
would not use the 17x in a hurry, rather using other devices such as the
8051.

-- Charles