Hey Bit, I am not familiar with the pre-Ozone 5 aspects, but that certainly makes sense. My conundrum last night was that the EQ Matching still exists (with identical functionality to O5), but the ability to save the *.snapshot files disappeared. The current setup actually promotes "EQ matching a bus/master" rather than use on a track, which seems to be counter-productive to your point.
Where I was using this was to tone-match a friend's vaunted PRS McCarty/Blackstar tone using a "close enough" TH3 preset and EQ Matching. This can be done with O8, but saving the curve, O8 resetting itself, and the fact that EQ modules do not cross talk (they must be on the same buss which defeats the whole point) is a royal PITA.
O5 is much simpler... two EQ modules on separate tracks, baseline the reference, save the snapshot, switch to the target track, load the snapshot, baseline the target, choose the ref and targets, then "Match" and tweak to taste (and save the snapshot again if the identical target can be used later). AFAICT, the "guts" of that module are unchanged from O5->O8, only the thing not there is the "snapshots." It is significantly more convenient to load a single EQ in the future and call up "Tom's Deceiver intro.snapshot" so the reference is right there without needing to pull it again (loading the reference track, baselining, yada, yada...).
I was expecting this to be a two-minute deal, but turned into a cluster. Upside is O5A is on this machine now, so next go-round it will be quick. Lesson learned.
Aside to this is that the match worked like a charm. The real end point is to show him suggestions with arrangement, but this was pulled from a 4-track, so I actually need to do a cover of it (and it is 7:12 in length).