Our robot uses every interrupt and all but one analog/digital port. For this reason we can’t switch to the cortex. Was the cortex deliberately designed with less ports than the v0.5 because of the potential with smart sensors? Otherwise, why does it have less ports? Please explain Vex’s plan for smart sensors.
Determining the number of ports on the Cortex required typical engineering design tradeoffs. Of course, we wanted to meet or exceed the ports on the PIC. However the reality of processor choices and cost options reduced the practical number and type of ports we could provide on the current Cortex offering.
Design is all about balance, and we wanted to find the balance that would provide the highest value product possible to our customers. Unfortunately this meant a few ports were removed from this design…
We do know that future smart sensors will reduce the number of needed ports. We hope to announce and release a few of these in 2011. I promise there is some cool stuff coming 
For now, I’m sorry for the inconvenience.