While I happen to not be much of a SL fan, I can understand where he is coming from in this instance. I have never toured but I would imagine that having to deal with a different mixer every night would be a pretty big pain in the butt. If you a touring with a board that has all your mixes already on it, I would imagine it isn't really practical to use a house board even if the house board is much higher end than what you have. For theatre work (which is what I do), I would take an M7 over any 48 channel analogue Midas regardless of how much outboard you give me since I want to have scene recall for pretty much every parameter everything.