Mucking About with Shift Registers

May be seriously reconsidering how to run this dog&pony show after playing around a bit with a  shift register.  A shift register, to my layman's understanding, holds much in common with the switchboards you see in old  movies or the original Lassie television series; your Arduino dials into the register (via 3 pins) and tells it which of its eight output pins it would like to talk to.  Effectively, three of your pins become eight, so you end up with more than double the number of pins you started with.

Shift registers can be daisy-chained, and while they are digital by nature, there is an analog equivalent called an analog multiplexer/demultiplexer, allowing you to do effectively the same thing.