There are several chips around that can do BCD (4 bit binary) to 7 segment, but I'm not aware of any that do a 1 of 10 to 7 segment.
However, as a younger lad, I did exactly what you did with a fistful of diodes - but my solution was more "3-dimensional" than planar. All it had was 10 wires coming in and 7 wires going out.
The construction began with a strip of Veroboard, 7 holes by 10 holes. I then lined up and soldered the diodes along one row of the Veroboard for one decoding sequence, then the next sequence on the next row and so on. Every diode was inserted without bending any leads - and in the end it looked like a black and silver forest. Once these were all done, I added another piece of Veroboard on top, with the tracks running at 90ยบ to the ones at the bottom.
When finished, you will have a block of diodes that provide all the decoding with 10 strips of copper on one end (for the input) and 7 strips of copper on the other for the 7 segment output. Replacing a failed diode with this construction is quite the challenge - but if you wanted to make this easier, you could run a series of simple bus-bars along one end instead of using a second piece of Veroboard and just solder the diode leads to them. I'd suggest adding some insulating material between the rows, just to make sure there are no accidental shorts.
You can build this the size of a 7 x 10 field of diodes and, if maintainability isn't important, you can make it the height of the length of the body of a diode plus two pieces of Veroboard. To give yourself the best opportunity to change diodes out, use the bus-bar approach and don't cut anything off the length of the diode leads.