The main difference between us is the sourcing capabilities
I'm buying everything from china, so I'm paying about 3 cents for 24C256 and parallel eeprom is somewhere around 40 cents. I guess, I can tolerate the difference But for PICs, 2nd hand 16F886 is about 70 cents, and 2nd hand 18F4550 is about $4, that is already a difference
and regarding the pin count, what you're trying to say, that 40 pin or 64 pin PICs aren't available in 16F series? For sure they are.
So if you have simple, clean to understand code for working with MSSP in PBP, I'd like to have a look...