Any idea why this isn't part of emplode already?

1) What Mark said.
2) emplode hasn't seen any development effort since 2.0-final was released. When I left, it was planned to include v3.0 car player support in the next version of Rio Music Manager, since it's the most flexible platform, going forward, but that'll take some time -- not least because there's a lot to do -- I'm guessing.