One of the main design considerations of Interval bars was trying to minimize the number of connections between adjacent bars. The current design has three connections - two for power and one which is a bidirectional, self-synchronizing data signal. The logic to synchronize everything ended up being a fairly complicated bit of code. It would be much simpler and faster if all the microcontrollers were driven from a single clock signal, so that all the signals could be synchronous. However, that would end up using 4 pins instead of 3.
What if instead of combining the clock signal with data, we combined it with power? Well, it's only worth doing this if we can do it without too much external hardware. A simple resistor/capacitor filter would be acceptable, but that's not enough to properly restore both power and clock signals. The DC part (across the capacitor) would be okay but then across the resistor we would get an AC signal, when what we really want is a square wave that oscillates between 0 and 5V, so we'd need some additional components to fix up the clock signal.
The worse problem, though, is that with each interval bar added to the circuit, we'd be adding an additional capacitor (in series with a resistor) between ground and (power+clock), so the clock signal is going to get degraded (it's amplitude will be reduced) with each bar. We can reduce this problem by increasing the resistance of the resistor, but then we'd have to use a higher voltage for the power line, increasing the complexity of the root box.
In the end I decided that a solution that makes the hardware simpler but the software more complicated was preferable, since the software only needs to be written once, but who knows how many times an interval bar will get built?