You know, it looks to me like you could make your own faceplate(s) to tfabris' concept and attach them to the existing faceplate with a non-destructive glue such as rubber cement or maybe even small Velcro patches.

If you went the Velcro method, you could make up a second faceplate out of a piece of dash trim gleaned from a wrecking yard that was just a solid plate that would effectively make the empeg invisible.

I guess I'm just getting old, or perhaps incurably stylistically-impaired... but I don't think the faux-woodgrain design looks that bad, particularly if you made the panel out of the exact same dash trim as the rest of the dash so the effect would be just the empeg display embedded mysteriously in the middle of an otherwise stock dashboard.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"