JTC - An interesting thread apart from you railing off against the old Ops Control. As I understand it all IFR aircraft require some sort of OPS Control I believe it is even defined by ICAO. Remember the old Initiation, Continuation, Termination or Diversion of a flight. The controllers and the FSO's providing the briefing and "control" may have been older but they were doing a job required by the Australian Government, so leave them out of this. The job was in keeping with the old DCA's (Donald George Anderson) iron fisted control over aviation, indeed Australia was once called the Police State of Aviation by Flight International. It was part and parcel of the Government controlled duopoly, parallel schedules and very high air fares that we all enjoyed.
My point is that to some extent things don't seem to have changed! We are all so used to being told what to do by way of regulations and proscribed actions that the idea that a bloke (or sheila) with a microphone couldn't give pilots enough information for them to work out what was going on, is completely foreign to us. Could he or she give us a reasonable summation of the weather, of course they could, what about which runway everyone else was using, easy, and what about the other aircraft, no problem. Of course I'm not talking about the local cab driver (no offence meant to cab drivers) who happened to be waiting for a fare. The operator would have to be an aviation oriented person with some experience. Say, an instructor, the fuel truck driver, the airline or charter operators agent. Even an ex-air traffic controller, God forbid! But, why does it have to be a dedicated person?
To me a unicom is simply a basic information service, a CA/GRS is another name for a FISO and then you get to ATC. Personally I think we need IFR approach control services at these airports long before any airport based service such as CA/GRS or Tower are needed. Unfortunately Class E airspace doesn't include enough regulation and proscription for our "aviation police state" pre-disposition. Consequently we make do with jet transport aircraft making IMC instrument approaches in Class G airspace while trying to work out where the scud-runners are coming from, info from Unicom or CA/GRS notwithstanding.