@Schoenfeld
Thunderous applause to you Jens, again I say you rock!
Obviously your focus is the eventual move to a Mini-ITX based system, which is totally killer (tho I hope a full ATX design is also in the plans)...
But have you considered possible improvements to the "drop in" chipset? An upgrade perhaps to the chips in existing OCS/ECS systems? I'm sure there are numerous improvements to performance that can be made.