Device List - Item # vs Channel #

New desk just arrived, upgrading from Congo Sr --> Cobalt 20, very excited. Writing a fresh show file for our house hang, from scratch but based on the current, stupid, patch. I am not repatching because I would like to be able to safely Import old show information from the Congo Years, since we have a refocusable moving light rig and many shows are returners. 

Because the patch is dumb, the fastest way to patch a show is to patch it in big chunks via the Patch Wizard--out of order--and then renumber the channels into an order that makes sense. What this means is that the channel order in the Device List, when the list is sorted by its default Item #, is all over the place. I notice that my original shows appear to have been patched using a different method, so as the Item # goes up, the Channel # goes up. Apart from the mild annoyance of a sloppy list display, my question is this: 

To what does device info--Palettes, Preset data, anything Importable--attach? Does it reference the Item, or the Channel number? If a "Device" is the item in the list, it seems to me if I patch my new file in a different order such that item 15 (new show) is a different object from item 15 (last several years show), my imports won't work properly? Or does it really matter?

[Edited to add:] OK, odd: on restart (dinner break), channel #s are ascending with item #s, which was not the case when patched. Tab refresh issue? Imma keep building my show, but I guess my question remains, if in a different form: what constitutes a Device, exactly, and where does show data adhere?

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