Best to you and the family for the holidays, Jack.
Mark
And the same to you and yours. Stay safe.
BTW, I think the the title of this topic is a great question. Very direct and to the point, and at just the right level to be something that is open to discussion. Something more complicated, no way. Something simpler, easy. This thing is at just that point where it's not so easy to say for sure and leads to an interesting discussion about pros and cons.
I see a couple of limitations that might come into play. The Spin chip only has 128 instructions per fx patch. The reverb, in particular, will eat up a lot of the available code space. In addition, the memory has to be shared among all the fx that need it, and the chorus will need a chunk, then the reverb will eat most of the rest. A simple reverb will be about the best you can do, but fortunately, it will be in character for the Rockman, which did not have complicated reverb hardware.
I think the distortion and its related tone shaping are best done analog style with the dsp handling the rest. I like your idea of using the two available signal paths to manage the fx. I like this version with the FV providing the compression:
FV-1 Left input ->Compressor->FV-1 Left output->Analog Distortion/Tone->FV-1 Right Input->chorus->reverb->FV-1 Right output
This simplifies the compressor by eliminating the need to match/find jfets to produce the correct compression response. Also, analog tone shaping will free some code space in the FV-1.
regards, Jack