Yep, that is an old-school approach.
Parcels would probably make all that easier, but at the cost of fighting the labels. It's a trade-off. There's a way to add custom properties to Parcels, but I haven't tried playing with it yet. I *think* it would work for all the extra pieces of information you're talking about - then you could edit that information for all Parcels in Toolspace.
But even without using Parcels, I think you could use Map Topologies to speed up your current procedure. If you turn your linework into a polygon topology, you can do "Create closed polylines" to create a closed polyline around every lot all at once. No need to run BPOLY on every lot.
I understand what you mean about annotations. They're pretty clunky compared to C3D labels with reference text. But you could conceivably use Object Data to attach all the information to the centroid, and then use a Map Annotation to label each lot. Editing Object Data isn't the most-pleasant task, but it would allow you to use Map Annotations to label all lots at once. That's useful, because it helps prevent errors. If you change your parcel layout, you can simply update the annotations (or delete and recreate them), and you know they're all up-to-date.
Parcels are similar to using Map Topologies and Annotations, except everything auto-updates as you edit items. This is a mixed-blessing - editing Parcel linework has a tendency to renumber lots and do funky things to existing labels, so it's not the best. But with Map topologies, the easiest way to do significant edits is to delete the Topology, change the linework, and then recreate the Topology. So in some ways Parcels are like new-and-improved Map topologies.
But Parcels cannot autodetect and warn you about gaps, overshoots, etc., like Map topologies do. Parcels happily use bad linework to create what look like Parcels, but aren't right. The joys of Autodesk software - we have nifty Parcels that are easier to edit than topologies but are "stupid", we have Map topologies that are smart enough to detect problems in linework but aren't the easiest thing to use, and the two things are incompatible with each other.
