[prunebeads]

You're not, imho. The problem is : how do we manage the data associated with the structure of this gigantic state-machine. It is likely to change overtime, so it cannot be hard coded (although if it were, one could perhaps use a tool which compiles the state machine to hard code).

Basically, many of the solutions proposed are more or less specialized state machines (decision trees, markov chains, rete algorithm).