I must admit I have a hard time figuring out a use case for controlling stepper motors with discrete components. You might want want something simple for educational purposes, but that's about it. The challenge is you need to excite each coil of a stepper motor (2 or more) in succession and that requires digital logic. At the very least you need a flip-flop and a PWM, which puts us in the "common ICs" territory.

I realized I may want to slightly re-jigger the talk but more on that later.