I never had much luck with the de-esser either... good to know it's not just me. Did you ever try messing around with sidechain EQ and the parallel dry pass-through on the normal comp to get something similar? (The thought just occurred to me now... could be a completely stupid or useless idea).
Very cool, though I could have done without a transient designer if it meant we could do sidechain compression and gating. Dynamic EQ and scene fades will be very helpful.
In other news, I'd like a way to reboot the user interface without switching off the whole console. I've had the interface freeze up without stopping audio, of course the only way to fix it is: