I answered a similar question by anyfoo downthread, the point about implementing a PIT should explain what I mean, and why I think that emulating a simple real architecture might be more useful while requiring similar effort.
Since I have the exact same thought (that you are coming at this from a software engineering direction, not a computer architecture/engineering one), this is unlikely to be further productive :(
You say you want students to be able to write emulators/simulators etc. (you list a bunch of software.engineering tasks). I say writing an LC-3 emulator won't give you any transferable skills for writing, say, a Gameboy Emulator (still a 30yo system), because these educational arhitectures are bad and abstract away precisely the things that you have to get right to do that, leaving you with something trivial to implement: a C array for "memory" and a few bitwise operations.
Since we're largely looking at the same things and coming to orthogonal conclusions, I suggest we agree to disagree on this one.
