I'm not a big fan of "output modules" - in a lot of cases they are unnecessary... I've never used one in 7 years... but I've always had mixers with headphone outputs - a rebel technologies mix03 and a tesseract modular tex-mix... if I needed (& only if I needed balanced or isolated outputs - perhaps for playing gigs) would I spend money on an output module... so the question is what are you outputting to? I use a small old-ish (15years or so) yamaha mg10 mixer which can easily handle modular levels - just get your gain staging right (ie low) - and most mixers and audio interfaces will work perfectly...
and as for vc crossfaders and auto-panners - maybe get more vcas and patch them yourself - it's modular after all - and whilst pan-law is great - a lot of records were made without it...
"some of the best base-level info to remember can be found in Jim's sigfile" @Lugia
Utility modules are the dull polish that makes the shiny modules actually shine!!!
sound sources < sound modifiers < modulation sources < utilities