40ish.... 265... holly cow.

80-100 maybe. But it would be less if I had to redo the family now. I'd reconsider the general setup of your family. Could you post it for us to have a look (and strip some parameters)?

If the majority of them are yes/no visibility parameters, ask yourself if you are really gaining anything by having the *super family*. I mean, you use the type selector to switch Types, and you use the type selector to change families. In general, i find Super Families to be a waste. In a few RARE cases i see them adding value, but not very often. We generally model more things and more detail than most offices, and i still havent found a need for more than 75ish parameters in a piece of content, disregarding Kelly's highly parametric Building Form for sa-rang.

Sure, refer to attached. Keep in mind our models are not "industry standard" due to the added complexity of our ordering system. Some examples of options are:
Up to 3 exhaust risers
2 choices of supply plenum
Supply plenums can be on 0-4 sides
Up to 7 risers available for each type of supply plenum

I am currently trying to figure out how to have the catalog file drive the type/shape of riser (ie, round8, rect4x10) and type of plenum (ie, psp12, acpsp22), since it looks like we cant link family type parameters.

Constructive crit is always welcome.

I think revit doesn`t have a limit with numbers of parameters.My personal record is 1149 parameters in a wasted window family (i didn`t know that time to switch nested families by using Family Type Parameter). The limit is the usability limit for a normal user. Also if you have complicated formulas and/or array you will also have a waiting limit when update the parameters. My advice is keep under 100parameters and to make more families.

and people give me a hard time about my 20 or so parameters....

My users would shoot me if they had that many options.

Its actually not that bad...once I get my panels to be shared I'll be able to get rid of 7 of them...

Well, to start off:
It's kind of redundant to have a Type Selector AND be able to change the sizes of the parts by parameter. That's exactly why you have the type selector. So, I'd lose those and create a few types of components which adresses this. This also reduces the need to link through parameters.

I am finding a whole bunch of parameters in the component families which don't seem to drive any geometry. Why is that? For instance the component PSP.rfa, which has a bunch of offset parameters that don't do squat...

I would use the built in Level of Detail-options (Visible in Coarse/Medium/Fine) instead of visibility parameters. Not all Yes/No parameters. Keep in mind that these Yes/No parameters work ON ALL VIEWS! You cannot use them to control visibility per view (and I think that this is the reason you created them in the first place).

Also, it probably won't happen that you show the Util Cab Left, and not Right. Instead of having 3/4 parameters defining the visibility of all sides separately, you could use 1 parameter controlling all of them.

So I do think you can loose a lot of parameters...

Holy crap!!!! now that are a lot of parameters...

Well, that's a small amount. 20 parameters is nothing in most of my families...