I haven't kept up with the hardware so my views may be out of date - Bruce can correct me where necessary The Holtek (and clone) decoder chips have a fixed number of data lines (4 or 8) so you have a limited number of possible codes. These may be adequate for what you want to do - I just prefer more flexibility. Doing your own protocol allows more control. Now, if you want to skip the chips and just use Holtek's encoding scheme, you can have billions of codes.

The device you linked to may well work. I just think utilizing it represents more work than doing it from scratch. Of course, I'm biased as I've done it from scratch many, many times. Once you do it from scratch, you may come to share my bias.

Also, when you wrote CNC, I thought CONTROL which is why I emphasized error detection. But, if you are merely reporting status, error detection may be less of a priority.