Yes exactly my thinking. Hence in my initial dual setup I had two transports syncroniced going into RME and M7 for easy switching between them from the amp's remote. While it turns out I do like salt on everything I too had consern about looking myself into a singularity
One interesting thing I learned from this exercise. The RME can do EQ that for sure are a more powerful tool to dial pleasant sound in a budget stereo/room. But for some reason I was not able to dial it to
set and forget. Always naging back of my head
'I could do better with this track'. Given how we today consume playlists from random albums adjusting for each track get tedious and ruin the whole process of listening to music for relaxation and mental healing. Here averaging has its place and M7 do this in a subtle way I found hard to accomplish with the EQ. Others might do better here of course.
For mastering chain search for 'saturation', 'harmonic enhancers' or 'bus color box' to find products sometimes used.
This podcast on saturation the master in some way also explain why some are not chasing SINAD due to how some older analog recordings have a certain sound