Well hardly much more code. All (most of?) the LCD examples use the individual bits method.
Be warned that the D port on the Uno shares D0 and D1 with the USB chip and if you are not careful the pull-ups may push them high. This probably won't be an issue if they are configured as outputs, but with 32 Kb of program memory, breaking the bits into individual pins won't be a huge overhead.
However if you can make it work, fine. That will simplify things.