dchiggins,
I am sorry you didn't find my response helpful, but in fact I did confirm for you on behalf of Adobe that this functionality is no longer in Acrobat and the reasons why.
Your use case is in fact quite novel and clever; I am sure the JDF feature allowed you to accomplish something that in fact the feature wasn't actually primarily designed to do.
Given your concerns over the time it would take to combine 126 separate PDF files into a single PDF file for review and print, it may be worth it to get a consultant to put together some JavaScript to perform this function programmatically for you on a daily basis.
- Dov