Another thing. I had approx 5y ago the Focusrite Liquid Saffire 56 and the Octopre Mk II. The Poti quality was very bad. On the 1st ~75% of Poti doesn't have any effect, the real gain adjustment then happens on the last 25%.
On the RME you choose between 2 Reference Levels, LoGain and +4 dBu depending what input sensitivity is required depending what type of signal the source delivers, more consumer levels or studio levels which are higher.
The additional Gain knob is additionally to the reference level setting to fine tune line inputs 1 to 8 from 0 dB to +12 dB.
Regard the 1st as a general settings for consumer or studio level and then additional fine tuning to add some gain if required to find an optimum level.
The TotalMix faders are simply for creating the submix for each output.
Every output is a submix of its own.
The concept of operations in TM FX is very logic and structured, the best I ever seen from operations and feature wise.
In submix mode you click to an output, phones or main monitors for example, and then you simply adjust the faders of HW inputs (what comes from the inputs of the recording device directly - top row of faders) and the SW playback channels, whats comes from either DAW (RME ASIO driver) or OS/Applications (RME WDM driver), this is the middle row of faders.
As you can easily see where a signal is, you can very quickly create the routing / submix for each of the output channels.
Another things .. With the introduction of the Scarlett Series the Focusrite drivers do not support loopback operation anymore, bummer !
With RME Loopback operation is easy .. you route something to an output of your choice, i.e. ADAT1/2, press Loopback there and you have the desired submix on the corresponding HW input ADAT1/2 and can record it with either DAW or another PC application, if you created the WDM device for ADAT1/2. In the driver settings dialog you can choose for which channels you wish to have WDM devices, so that non-ASIO aware applications can make use of those channels. If you have Speakers conntected behind a channel, i.e. Analog 1/2, then there is a second Tab in the drivers settings dialog, where you choose Speaker channels. This creates then an ouput in the Windows Sound settings.
Everything very flexible, reliable, logic. Never saw something better. Try both you will see and find out yourself.
BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13