As a person who has had a bunch of these hats, I can attest to a couple things:
2. Even better is just getting a Raspberry Pi 4 and installing Ropieee and hooking that up to a USB DAC. This is the direction I'm going with the latest two endpoints I have in the house.
This is one of my current 2 setups...RPi4 with Roopiee USB out to RME ADI-2 Pro DAC. Result is outstanding!
Here's a kicker tho...I have RPi3 with Digi+ Pro HAT. I put Moode on, with Graphics EQ, it is close to my setup 1 above....When I say close..the only missing link is Roon has its own EQ and I find it's not as good as Moode's EQ (Moode also has Parametric EQ but I like the Graphic EQ better). So if I could configure Roon's Parametric to match w Moode's Graphic EQ, the RPi3 with Digi+ PRO will be the winner in my book!