ECP and EPP are not really useful for GPIO-style use and even the simpler modes are not really desirable if the adapter is implementing the handshaking in hardware. You really just want to be able to manually control all the bits. The original parallel port (and later integrated ones when set to an appropriate mode in the BIOS) allowed this because it was a very simple device and relied on software to handle things like toggling the data strobe line when a byte was written to the data lines.