That's what I was thinking, some kind of USB-D card standard that specified exactly where the port goes. It would be extra cool because it could also serve as

That's what I was thinking, some kind of USB-D card standard that specified exactly where the port goes. It would be extra cool because it could also serve as a battery format, just make a power bank in that size. USB 2.0 and 1.1 are trivial solved problems in practice. They're built into so many chips now, and it's far easier to work with in terms of PCB design. Stuff like the ESP32-S2 or even the soft implementations in 8 bit micros are really good and just work, plus you have the possibility of fully driverless stuff pretending to be storage, keyboards, midi, ethernet, etc, and it's all just as easy as any other Arduino lib, no protocol understanding needed. It's true that you can't do dumb passive stuff with it(Although if you really wanted to you could use a dedicated USB to SPI/I2C/GPIO whatever chip and have the PC emulate whatever you want), but that doesn't really hold back products, things are just done differently. It sucks for anyone trying to make gadgets that aren't just a microcontroller plus code, but there's so many possibilities with the new style that it's worth learning. For hobby tinkering type stuff and exploring stuff outside "A PC that talks to a MCU", yeah, it's not really a supported use case.