"was amazed with how antiquated the port request system truly is"

Absolutely. In the UK, I could easily port someone or many someone's landline number and slap a trunk on it. Sadly though I would also end up paying the bill for it. However its much easier to simply fake your outbound CLID to show the call centre you are the mark.

I have no numbers for this but I'll bet that CLID is used by banks etc as part of the security checks for your identity.