Timbo Like you, I would like to connect to mount directly
There are roughly two major components in hobby equatorial mounts.
The first is the motor and the motor drive logic. This part is a simple minded mechanism -- tell it the motor's angle and it will go to that angle. In an Equatorial Drive, the "RA motor" is the Hour angle, and the Declination motor is the declination angle. It does not know the sidereal time, and thus has no idea where a star's Right Ascension is in the sky.
The second major part is the rest of the software (often touted by manufacturers as a "GOTO Mount") relates the motor angle to the actual sky coordinate angle (for example, it associates the Right Ascension of a star to the Hour Angle of the mount -- that relationship changes by the time of year and time of day). This part knows the precise time, latitude and longitude of the mount, and you can therefore send it a star's coordinate in the sky, and the mount will move to the star. For German mounts, this is also where the Meridian Flip lives.
With some SkyWatcher mounts, you have a access to both of these interfaces. The hand controller executes a program that is generally called SynScan by SkyWatcher. At the same time, you can buy adapters called the EQMOD to allow your computer to directly control the mount without the hand controller. This is why, with most of the SkyWatcher (and mounts that OEM from SkyWatcher) you can simply connect an EQMOD cable (nowadays, a USB connector with a serial interface) and bypassing the hand controller. With the EQMOD mechanism, the "second part" of the mount is performed by the mount driver of the computer. A Meridian Flip, for example is performed by the driver.
With some other mounts, like the RainbowAstro, most of the second part is contained in the mount itself, and the hand controller simple has the buttons (and WiFi and GPS). In this case you can also directly connect the computer to the mount, without the need of a hand controller.
With some other mounts, the second part is built into the hand controller. In such a case, you cannot even command the mount to perform a GOTO without using the hand controller. Some manufacturers like this model since it allows them to upgrade the capabilities of the mount by selling you a new hand controller. However, it also means that you cannot computer control the mount without connecting through the hand controller.
If you shop around, you should be able to find mounts that don't require a hand controller to be computer controlled. Your dealer should know the mount's capability (otherwise it is time to switch dealer).
Chen