I'm not sure if I agree on the difficulty of this.
Doing a custom display is one thing, but getting something that is backwards compatible the good-ol' 14 pin LCD interface and works with all the software that's already out there is just plain *neat*.
For chuckles, I pulled the glass off of a 8x2 LCD I had lying around, and all the contacts are pretty well setup. On the particular LCD I picked, the pitch is just a bit shy of standard .1", but it fits if you split apart the cable a little bit. If I had to build more than 1, a custom circuit board and reusing the zebra strips would make this really easy.
The pinout is pretty obvious- plus you can see the traces on the LCD glass itself - the column pads and the row pads are pretty distinct, 2 groups of 20 column pads and 4 groups of 4 row pads - 40x16. 16 mosfets, and a couple bus buffer chips/registers... It would be a bit tiresome, but then again considering how many LEDs you'd be wiring up...
Aside from the mild trickyness that you need to do in order to decode the drive lines, the only real gotcha is that the LCD seems to be a "1/16" duty cycle - each row would only be on 1/16'th of the time, in comparison with the dedicated chips which drive it for longer durations. Also, refresh rate seems to be ~100Hz which is okay, but not great.