From a manufacturer perspective having a device with too many possible ways of doing things is not attractive from various perspectives:
- it takes away one parameter for product differentiation
- testing all possible configurations is hard
- it becomes hard to tell whether a fault is your responsibility or the responsibility of the user
- support will become more important. Support for complicated things is expensive
- mechanical I/O is typically one of the biggest cost factors in such products. If you want to support all possible I/O scenarios that is going to be a lot of connectors and thus prohibitively expensive
- most customers will rather buy the mixer can do a lot than the multipurpose device that can be forced to be a mixer
All in all there are not that many advantages for manufacturers.
That being said, I run an Extron DMP 128 Plus with Dante at work. It is basically a 128bit channel mixer on 1HE with a ton of powerful DSP and many ways to control the DSP (RS-233, Telnet, Http, Web UI, ...)
But it is not the cheapest device out there.
- it takes away one parameter for product differentiation
- testing all possible configurations is hard
- it becomes hard to tell whether a fault is your responsibility or the responsibility of the user
- support will become more important. Support for complicated things is expensive
- mechanical I/O is typically one of the biggest cost factors in such products. If you want to support all possible I/O scenarios that is going to be a lot of connectors and thus prohibitively expensive
- most customers will rather buy the mixer can do a lot than the multipurpose device that can be forced to be a mixer
All in all there are not that many advantages for manufacturers.
That being said, I run an Extron DMP 128 Plus with Dante at work. It is basically a 128bit channel mixer on 1HE with a ton of powerful DSP and many ways to control the DSP (RS-233, Telnet, Http, Web UI, ...)
But it is not the cheapest device out there.