Hi Steve, great that you're also here in San Diego. I've been here since '93. AllStar is indeed the future of repeater systems, and the only way to properly link repeater systems in a transparent way ie. that does not limit their features or audio quality. However, I believe that some oversights were made around the time that personal nodes started being developed. It seems the old-school repeater guys focus on their side of things (repeaters, or high-end nodes such as what you made with 2 CDM1250's), and then about 10 years ago when personal nodes became cost-effective, the Florida contingent came out with HamVOIP for RPi, cheap low-quality SA818 modules became available and next thing you know, low-quality simplex "hotspots" were the hot new thing.
Somewhere in that transition to "hotspots", some things were overlooked. It's as if it never occurred to anyone that hotspots don't have to have the issues detailed above. Anyone can now set up a high quality cross-band full-duplex node for under $200, and with a ~$100 Wouxun cross-band full-duplex HT can use AllStarLink the way it was originally intended, fully preserving all the features of repeater systems while also further enhancing them and setting the foundation for future innovations. This is the future and it's already here now and working perfectly. There are still a lot of misconceptions people have about what this really means, but over time as adoption of high-quality full-duplex personal nodes continues to increase, the paradigm of consumer-grade simplex nodes will gradually fade away.
I also use KiCAD for all my PCBs. Below is a brochure with PCB pics of my URI201 which has the most extensive RFI-rejection of any URI I know of:
Since you're here in SD and worked with Jim I'd be happy to get you one of these at no charge if you'd like to try it out. Have you been to the weekly ham luncheons here in SD every Friday? There's about 20 guys here, many of them retired EE's, who have some pretty cool projects going on.