I wanted to follow up on my initial thread with my experience to date.
Sent back the unit with the memory issue, and got a replacement unit that had been dropped. The box was mangled and the rack ear bent. FAS was very cool about it and shipped me a new one. So I'm finally back to where I was with a fully functional rig and a handful of good presets. So here are a few conclusions I have been able to draw...
The MFC101 rocks! I had an Ultra years ago with a ground control pro. That was a giant PITA, which I never got working to my satisfaction. Then I picked up a used FCB1010 and installed the uno mod. That was worse! I ditched the entire modelling rig and went back to tube amps. Got a cusack programmable loop switcher and spent a lot of money on pedals and was satisified for a while. No matter how good my tone is, if i spend more time programming the control than the patches, something is wrong. The MFC101 is dead easy, and it just works.
FRFR is the way to go. With the presets carefully designed and eq'd, my behringer powered monitors sound great. I mean, my tone now is better than any tube amp I have owned (fuchs, badcat, matchless, tone king, boogie...). It sounds HUGE - and totally cuts through the mix. EVERYONE notices, and tells me how awesome my guitar sounds. I should mention that it is almost dead silent, even with some pretty high gain patches. I am sure investing in a high end FRFR system would sound even better, but don't be fooled into thinking you need to make a huge investment to get some initial tonal satisfaction. I am sure a year from now, I will have a matrix, atomic or whatever is next. Still, a basic quality FRFR will get you a lot of milage.
Save some time and buy mission cc pedals. I've been f'ing around with modding volume pedals, buying adapters, etc. to get all of my old pedals working. I have 1 mission pedal and it still works 1000 times better than anything else. They have a bstock sale right now!
Don't be afraid of simplicity in your patches. I have seen some wicked complicated patches out there. I think that's part of the draw - you can cover territory that has never been covered in an analog rig. But don't think that dropping an amp, cab and reverb block on a patch - and nothing else - is "under using" this device. I have a vox ac 30 tb patch that rules, and it has 3 blocks on it.
Wishes for the future. If there is anything I wish for, it would be more time invested in AXE-Edit. It is immeasurably better than it was, but I still find it frustrating to use. I won't go into all the idiosyncrasies here, as they are well covered in the forum, but this app makes me crazy. I have pretty much moved back to editing everything on the unit itself. Which really sucks, because there are so many menus and buried params, it can be hard to see what you are working with at a glance. I have high hopes for some of the ipad controllers out there. I think a reliable wireless ipad controller that you could mount on one of these <http://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/iklip/> out by your foot controller would be the bomb. The one other thing I can think of would be some kind of utility to make eq'ing new environments easier. Perhaps a quality mic with tone match could allow you to measure the tonal response of an FRFR system and then automatically generate an eq curve to flatten it. Then all of your presets would be fully portable to different speaker systems without a ton of manual EQ.
