I’d be very interested to hear about your 828 (2024) experiences.
It’s the same AD/DA as the 828es which always impressed me. I’ve never AB’d the Babyface Pro with the 828es, both are adequately excellent so why go through the pain 
Cuemix 5 is probably a step up in terms of UI than their AVB UI. And very interestingly they have a native iOS app for it, as well as fudging remote control à la TotalMix Remote.
I just find the way TotalMix handles individual output mixes far more convenient and flexible. The 828es has 8 stereo aux mixes - more like a conventional console - while in TotalMix you can create an individual mix for every single physical output. I decided I wanted an additional speaker set up as kind of a “kitchen radio” mix checker - simply assign a mono output to it and create an individual mix - done! I want to capture a live stream plus some audio commentary - use an output pair as a loopback and create an individual mix for that output - done!
Once you’ve gotten used to having so many individual mixes, it kind of gets addictive…
Not having this flexibility was my main reason for taking the 828 out of my studio setup.
I agree that naming software ports after the physical output ports is an annoyance - probably a relic from older times when the assignment was fixed with no mixing at the output port level? But you get used to it - but the “NAME” button gets extensive use every day - what logical output is attached to what port name in the driver? Would be nice to be able to rename the channel names in the driver to something meaningful…
Got a motu 828 and rme ucx2 yesterday. I will report results in a few days.
Anybody have any particular ways of testing that you like?