It is certainly mission specific.

My main quandary is whether to step up to the intellijel case and isolate some of the needed mixers to the top of the case on the 1u slots.

I feel like this case violated the 'never enough VCAs' trope, but on the other hand there are a decent number of mixers and not a million things going on at once. The signal path basically moves across the case starting at the looper, then across the modules to the right and into the output.