I have just a few too many sources to use the OT without a small mixer to manage everything before it hits the OT. I use an A&H zed10 for this, cheap and fairly small. Then main out’s to my monitors and cue outs back into my computer for anything I might need to record / checking tuning. I use a thru track on track 4 that I manually start with by hitting the T4 button and play - avoids the necessity of any trigs on that track.
Some might say I’m sacrificing some audio quality by routing everything through my OT - imo the setup is too fun to worry about some marginal loss in audio quality.
Nothing can beat the OT as the brains for your setup for live sampling and transitions, not to mention sequencing. Unless the DT has some tricks that haven’t been seen yet.