For those who are curios as to the testing results of NCD vs. Lookdown2 in the context of this discussion.
I ran the following code in the MPLAB Simulator.

Code:
NCDSUB:
    for i = 0 to 255
	mystatus = i
	''Start MPLAB SIM Stopwatch
    	mybyte = NCD mystatus
    	''Stop MPLAB SIM Stopwatch
	next i
    lcdout $FE,1,"NCD: ", idec mybyte
    pause 500
    
    return
    
LOOKSUB:

    for i = 0 to 255
	mystatus = i
	''Start MPLAB SIM Stopwatch
    	lookdown2 mystatus, <= [%00000000, %00000001, %00000011, %00000111, %00001111, %00011111, %00111111, %01111111, %11111111], mybyte
    	''Stop MPLAB SIM Stopwatch
    next i
        
    lcdout,1, "Lookdown: ", idec mybyte
    pause 500

    return
and here are the results.

Name: NCDTest.png Views: 1035 Size: 7.7 KB