Depending on the venue / network topology, you could in theory use a managed switch with isolated VLANs to emulate the chaining of stage-boxes.
Say the boxes were routed into patch-panel inputs as needed; you could then patch them to a managed switch, with unique VLANs for each path, eg VLAN-2: S-LINK + AR2412, VLAN-3: AR2412-extender + AR84, and so on. Obviously this burns 2 switchports per (non-final) stagebox, but may offer flexibility where direct-Ethernet isn’t a trivial option for whatever reason. The same concept could apply to ME-units as well.
