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I wanted to post an update.
I wound up picking up a JLCooper MCS3 from eBay and I learned a few things.
One, JLCooper is terrible about model differentiation as they sold several versions of the MCS3 in two form factors and you have to know what to look for to tell them apart as there are no model number designations or suffixes to make it obvious whether a given unit is meant to control decks or drive editing software.
The original release of the MCS3 (this applies to the MCS2 also) is deceptively large. It's roughly 9x7 but in photos it looks about half that size. The jog/shuttle wheel has a nice weight and feel but everything else about it is oversized and clunky. At more than half the footprint of an RM-450 I wouldn't call it particularly compact and the example I got was RS-232 rather than RS-422 (but I didn't figure that out until after it arrived).
After that I picked a pair of Panasonics, an AG-A300 and an AG-A350.
The AG-A350 is a true compact dual edit controller which I had some experience with in college. I don't need the "edit" part of the controller but the size is right and it has what I think is a really nice jog/shuttle control and it works perfectly with all my gear.
The AG-A300 is a slow-motion playback controller which uses a T-bar instead of a wheel. It's single-deck and it stores multiple cue points which could be useful. The manual claims compatibility with the AU-65H plus some slow-mo capable VHS decks. This is a typo, they mean the AU-66H.
Still, I thought if it talked the Sony P2 protocol it'd still more or less work with my other decks and it did -- for all but one. With my AJ-D455, AU-65H, and PVW-2800 the T-bar acted like a jog/shuttle control which wasn't all bad. My BVU-870 would not play nice with signals from the T-bar though which was ironic since that's the only deck I have that actually has slo-mo capability.
If I had the time and patience, I'd build a converter that would let me use the Sony SVRM-100A (which talks Control-S rather than P2) as it's exactly the size I'm looking for, or else adapt the AG-A600 (except that 34-pin connector is pretty much unobtainium) and maybe if I ever get bored I'll look into that.
In the meantime, the AG-A350 is good enough for the price I paid for it.
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