Basically, to use OSC protocol I end up needing a finicky listening routine in the csound program, with all sorts of complications about starting & stopping notes from the messages... while the -L command line option lets me feed lines directly through the operating system into the score, with csound handling the subsequent timing automatically. So it depends what you mean by 'easier.'
Chuck does seems like a pretty heavy-duty program to use as a midi-timer; last night I worked out a short python script that seems to do the job; but chuck -- if it had the right file-handling capabilities -- is more specifically designed for coordinating a musical process, and might work better. I dunno.