Of course we were exaggerating the trait here, but the amount of features kind of suggested going a bit further. And yes, the project is cool, but I still think it's a little too much for its intended purpose (a knob!), with many more potential failure modes than a single knob/rotary encoder, which is not good. Besides, when designing projects with knobs, one is a lot more likely to implement an ad-hoc GUI rather than rely on a specific GUI on the knob itself that may not match the GUI for the rest of the product.
So, I think it's like a bad good idea (or a good bad idea, if you prefer), but that's just my opinion.