I agree with your sentiment David. I just left a response in the similar discussion in the thread re Video-assigning the audio inputs; maybe I should have read this first.
Not a perfect workaround (and still not enough), but I believe in the mean time you can get one more usable video input by assigning the front V input (any of the component inputs and any of the digital audio inputs can be assigned to it) to get the total to 6, and you can get one more again to get the total to 7 if you use the 7.1 input.