I see no issue with "downgrading" for reasons you mentioned. I love the sound of UA plugins, but I rarely use them due to the latency involved in the round trip to my quad card(if I only had it to do over.....). To me, Apollo makes a ton of sense if you love their plugins, and tracking thru them would be really nice. I went HDN because at the time, Apollo was still a "work in progress" with no Thunderbolt for PC, limited Windows features and . If I were building a rig today and the 4 headphone mix was enough(I need 6 for my setup), Apollo would be a no brainer
