When I put together projects like this I can't help but feel people look at it like some sort of steampunk alternate time line but where IC's stopped shrinking in the 70's instead of the during the industrial revolution. 

That's not exactly what I'm going for but I do appreciate the aesthetic of large DIP's on a modern PCB and it is fun to imagine a world where the electronics that powered Space Shuttle Columbia is still in wide use today.
Fun fact: At least until recently the ISS EVA Suits - a.k.a. space suits - were 6502 powered. Allegedly.

Just because IC packages have shrunk quite a bit over the past 50 years there's still quite a lot to learn from the integrated circuits that powered the home computer revolution and beyond. 

Concepts like memory addressing, stack, busses, interrupts, and machine language instructions - at least to me - really are a lot easier to get a firm grip on if you can point at a component and say "when I address I/O, this chip sets these voltages to indicate to this other chip what we want to do" instead of a single package doing all the work.

In a teaching environment, or just following along with my videos (or Ben Eater's for that matter) I hope that showing where each component is and what it specifically does will make programming, computer engineering and embedded design much less of a steep conceptual hill to climb. 

Hopefully I'll succeed doing exactly that with the #65uino. Liftoff!