I like your idea of a daughter board. i actually have one on the way From Karl at Radio Control Custom Tanks. Here is a link to products page and the daughter board. Iwas gettting it because I could just plug in everything individually instead of soldering a bunch of wires to one thing. Or having several wires run off of one contection. It replaces the 8 pin and then addes more connection points for stuff like the lights and machine gun.

http://www.radiocontrolcustomtanks.com/M-48.html