Good post Deda and fantastic input on an interesting problem.
My situation is similar to Deda's, I'm on a RADAR 24 Nyquist OTB but I do completely mobile recording. My setup fits in a trailer on my F350/truck-camper and I go to the acts and interesting venues to record.
Since I originally started out just tracking bands, I picked up an A&H ZED-428 28 input board to mainly do rough and cue mixes on. Now, my ears are not golden by any means but I find this relatively cheap board able to make some decent mixes because I am paying attention to getting the source sounds to be right before recording them. I think that extra effort makes mixing much easier. Right now, I'm very limited on my FX returns but it's something I'm able to live with since my track counts are relatively low.
I thought seriously about upgrading to a decent really good sounding board that is portable and the only thing that I think fits this bill is the Toft ATB32. I was scared away by the stories of poor build quality in the first series thinking that it would never hold up in a flight case in a trailer going down some gravel roads. I'm wondering if they've improved the build quality at all with subsequent models.
If I'm missing some options here other than the Toft, please speak up! And thanks for reading.
Keith