I’m with you most audio gear should have a network input these days and also an HDMI eArc input like the NAD M10 and some others. This is happening more and more but too slowly.
It will add to the cost of devices though so is tough to do in the lower end. Look at what the NAD BluOS network cards and Hdmi modules cost for example. No doubt with pi type technology it can be done cheaper but there is still quite a bit of cost involved.
No, you’re right.
If IR was good enough for us 50 years ago, it is good enough now, and 50 years from now.
I think we live in a great moment in Hi-Fi because we have both worlds and can decide. There are super integrated amps, and even streaming Hi-Fi speakers that sound well. But we can also go the route of separates and try different cables and power supplies etc. to alter the sound. Choices.
I had a Cambridge audio Edge NQ streaming pre and active speakers. One box plus speakers. I sold both to get a streamer, dac, amp and passive speakers. More boxes. Agains the grain. But I am very happy with it.
For many people hifi is a constant hunting for better sq and different gear. The industry would be foolish to not offer single boxes, upgrades, separate clock etc. But they also offer super integrated.
Maybe you should go out shopping for a super integrated amp plus active speakers? 
BTW do you find the mscaler necessary with your chord dac? I have the DAVE and preferred it without the MScaler.
The Mola mola Tambaqui comes to mind as a well build streaming dac.
A very interesting read, I too have a TT2 (Mscaler arriving soon) and when put together with my other gear its a mess. I have moaned to Chord in the past that the TT2 doesn’t support volume control over its USB to allow me to ditch the frankly disgusting remote control.
This thread was intended as musings about the trends in the industry and what a vendor should do, I didn’t intend it to be about my specific gear.
But since some of the discussion is specific:
As @ged_hickman1 and @Fernando_Pereira discuss, yes, I did have a Meridian system, all integrated, with the speakers containing streamers, DSP, digital-domain crossovers, DACs and amps. Sound great, neat and convenient.
Of course you can’t experiment with other electronics, but my hobby is music, not electronics, so I didn’t mind.
I had a long period when family considerations required I listen to headphones, and I got the Chord combination for driving Susvaras (and other gear and cans). That combination was sublime. (@Coltrane I can’t answer about the M-Scaler, I’m not a reviewer, once I have some gear that works well I don’t do systematic comparisons.)
The Meridians are lovely but I felt they didn’t match the nuance of the Chord-Susvara combination. Maybe because a speaker is more difficult than a headphone, maybe because the DSP8000 were designed near the turn of the century and while the system architecture holds up, the electronics are behind the times. And you can’t put the Chord in front of them.
So I moved the Meridians to the kitchen/dining room, and went the other way, with Wilsons and corresponding electronics.
But again, the thread is not about my gear, but about component architecture and industry trends.
I’ve been there with the streamer & Chord TT2/HMS stack.
Try an integrated streamer, like a Lumin or a Linn. That would solve your ‘problems’ 
Yes, have one on order, supply chain delays.
Lumin? Linn?
dCS Vivaldi
It is legacy gear, based on ideas about audio that are receding rapidly in the rear-view mirror. The whole idea of separate components is a legacy idea, based on the legacy financial schemes that drive the high-end audio industry. Buy a pair of Dutch & Dutch speakers and relax.
I’m neither a fan of cables that form a rats’ nest nor ziggurats of stacked boxes, yet some ‘legacy’ separates are among my very best components.
My Audio Note Soro SE still produces beautiful sound as does my newer NAD M33. Thankfully I can hide the nest of wires and most boxes inside a cabinet.
Not everyone has the budget for a dCS Vivaldi at over $75,000, or a pair of Dutch and Dutch.
Legacy and old-fashioned are separate, in my view. Some things are both.
The Chord is old-fashioned but not legacy.
The Meridian is legacy but not old-fashioned (not very).
Neither is bad.
My turntable is both, but too beautiful to drive to the dump.
All that said, I have believed in integrated systems (Meridian) but changed my view, they lock in technology and lock in a vendor.
In today’s fast-passed world I’m disinclined to lock in. Why I lease cars, especially EVs. I would lease hifi gear too if it was offered.
Outboard DACs are a real holdover. Sure, they made sense in the 80’s and 90’s, while digital was still being figured out, but today? And the M-Scaler? Really?
Look, this is hobbyist gear. It’s like driving old collectible cars. Fun stuff, if that’s what you like to do, but not really necessary for getting from one place to another. A modern integrated amp and a headphone or pair of speakers, that’s all anyone needs to listen to as much music as they can stand.
The problem with Ethernet jacks is that there’s no standard music protocol above the IP layer. And no normal person uses Ethernet, anyway. WiFi is the standard. All the new mass-market gear has WiFi and Bluetooth.
Here’s another thing to think about: do we really want gear to adapt to the changing world?
Let’s face it. Most music in the world today is listened to either with a YouTube video on a phone transmitting via Bluetooth to earpods, or by saying to an Alexa smart speaker, “hey, play Diana Krall.” Is that the behavior you want from your audio system?
I think your dates are completely wrong. The CD player wasn’t widely used until the 90s, and its peak was the early 2000s. Indeed, digital didn’t overtake physical sales until the next decade.
What we have today is choice, and that’s a good thing.
Completely wrong? I don’t think so. To be completely wrong I would have had to have put it in the 1930’s or 1750’s or some such.
The CD player, and the accompanying concept of music as a stream of digital samples, came out in 1982. For the next twenty years, engineers grappled with the ideal of producing the exact analog output that originally produced those digital samples. The 80’s and 90’s. After they more or less solved that, the technology was incorporated into mass-market gear with inexpensive mass-produced LSI chips, and the market for digital music took off. In the early 2000’s, as you say.
Don’t modern active speakers do high quality in a single box while solving all 3 of your observations of complexity:
They achieve that by undergoing the ultimate refinement, which takes time and thus their basis is rooted in older tech.
You opened with: “Outboard DACs are a real holdover.” Consumer DACs were largely integrated into equipment during this period, e.g., a part of the CD player. Chord DACs, which you’re clearly fond of ;), first appeared just over twenty years ago, but I concede that some home DACs were available in the late 1990s. So, okay, not completely wrong. 
Martin, we’re talking past each other. Regardless of when home standalone DACs became available, my thesis is that they didn’t make much sense after 2000. The mass-produced DAC chip technology was good enough. You could just use the built-in DAC in a CD player or, after Internet radio became a thing, the receiver. Sure, you could still buy lemons in both of those categories, but well-built gear had D/A circuitry that was good enough for almost all users. It was only during the experimental phase of the 80’s and 90’s that you could get real benefits from an outboard DAC.
And yes, 2000 is somewhat arbitrary, but the Marantz CD-7 (using the Philips TDA 1541A chip) came out in 1998. Heck, AKM built their first DAC chip in 1989.
And the 1930’s isn’t totally out of the question, either. Turns out PCM was invented in 1937.
This whole notion of component hi-fi wired together with a rats nest of controversial cables is a marketing invention of the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s. We should have gotten over it by now.