I don't really see those as issues... The hub chip is cheap and doesn't directly do i2c, but, so ? Controlling VBus seems to be by design, exactly for devices t

I don't really see those as issues... The hub chip is cheap and doesn't directly do i2c, but, so ? Controlling VBus seems to be by design, exactly for devices that are separately powered to still work: see author's other project https://github.com/JimHeaney/usb-toggle https://github.com/JimHeaney/usb-toggle . There should be a way to block further communication at the software level if that matters to one's use case. You can expand this, just plug a bunch of them into another hub...