Patience young Grasshopper, in time all things will be revealed. Some people have been asking for this for a very long time, in my work 100+ channel counts are not uncommon and I am not alone.[]

I did something very close to your second scenario recently.

Had an IDR64 as the main FOH mixer on stage right.
IDR32 was beside the drum kit linked into the IDR64 via ACE port B.

Mixed FOH on the IDR64 with a 112 surface.
Mixed Monitors on the IDR32 with an ILive80.

All the drum channels, bass and guitars were actually plugged into the IDR32 then exported back to the IDR64 via ACE. It was effectively using the IDR32 as a digital sub stage box for FOH.

All the monitor mixes were also exported back over ACE to the IDR64 so they came out physical outputs on the IDR64 even though they were being mixed on the IDR32.

While this doesn’t expand the channel count beyond 64, it does allow you to have sub stage boxes in the digital domain and or also for you to have an A/B setup with seperate inputs for two seperate acts.

Its very rare that you would use more than 64 channels at the same time, but the capability to do input switching for different acts exists right now.

I have heard the firmware for your first scenario is in the pipeline.