Amen Darth (nihilist?), too bad we didn't understand you through your mask. Great points and I second your motion for a national registry.
But states rights vs federal is as old as, well, the country, and not likely to change. NCEES may be the closest thing we can get to get all 50 states and Guam and Puerto Rico and ... all on board one ship. Doctors and lawyers and others have the same complaints. I have seen some egregious examples of medical licenses where some bad docs just move state to state with no national record following them.
Similar discussions have been had on this board also about having discipline specific PEs (mechanical, electrical, structural, civil, geotech, etc.). My dad is a medical tech at a hospital and their license is now federal. They also used to have to take 5 different licensing exams for each area they wanted to be responsible for, so I am not sure why they can do it and engineers could not. Sure there is cost in coming up with all of the different tests and licenses but those are passed on to us anyway.