Interesting thread. I've not experimented with the CE much, largely because much of what I've been tracking has come through a mixer in the first place so it seemed adding a further layer of console artifacts might be overkill. Though I suppose there's also the argument that when using tape everything went through a console at least twice, once for tracking and once for mixing.
I'm also old enough to remember DAWs being marketed as the technology that would liberate us from all that nasty distortion mixer channels and tape introduced which high-end hardware builders worked so hard to avoid. Maybe it's like when CBS bought Fender and their engineers started tweaking guitar amps to get rid of their distortion to "improve the sound quality" and ended up selling hyper-clean sounding products no-one wanted because the "bad" distortion and compression was what made the amps the great instruments they were.
Anyway, I've just ordered interfaces with enough inputs to let me dispose of the mixer, so I'll have to give the CE a try. Still not sure about the tape emulation though - for true realism surely it should need its heads virtually cleaning and demagnetising, offer a selection of tape stock which requires re-biasing to suit plus a "lazy apprentice engineer" button which emulates a variable and random lack of those things. Oh, and virtual print-through which gets worse the older the file is unless it's virtually re-spooled regularly of course.