i agree hdmi sucks. i dont really find it an enormous benefit to have the audio and video crammed into one cable, because as you mentioned - sometimes one doesnt want the audio to go where the video is going. in a sense this forces us to use video switching in our processor, because the hdmi will need to go both places (projector and processor) and it would be simplest to go to processor then out to projector. plus as you have said the hdmi connector is cheap. lucky for us, technology changes quickly and hdmi will be overtaken by something else.