For sure, HDMI is crap. Its main purpose is for the studios to make sure they can contain copyrights to their material, and no one can illegally distribute and view them. The current use of separate audio and video is fine.

As to toslink, or even firewire not being able to handle it; Ummm, don't you thing your media center computer could easily format that audio data to go across a toslink, and if greater is needed, send the audio via firewire, with the video image going out the DVI? Oh, yeah, I forgot, computers are just a passing phase.