Intuitively, it almost kinda seems like putting the management on the expensive device with lots of power rather than the cheap tiny card would be a good idea.

Intuitively, it almost kinda seems like putting the management on the expensive device with lots of power rather than the cheap tiny card would be a good idea. But I think SD made the right choice. It's a wonderful format, and having multiple competing cards really sucked. Packaging the firmware and controller on the card makes it trivially easy to make SD based applications.