That's about what I was expecting. I've been eying these boards since it was first announced (replacing the Crest XR-20 and XRM) and have been looking for negative reports. Haven't found anything short of "these idiots didn't put mutes on the aux masters!", which isn't a problem to me.
In regards to the limited channel count, if either of you (or anyone else, for that matter) has two of them, have you tried linking them together? I noticed that this was used by someone on APB's website. I've done this with a pair of the Crest boards a while back and it worked very well for what I was doing.
Nick.