Folks may be put off the CS consoles because they still have racks of conventional dimmers, often in multiples of six, and think Colorsource consoles are only for venues that have converted entirely to colour mixing fixtures. “Fear not”, I say unto thee - with V2.5, direct emitter control and a bit of lateral thinking, all is not lost. Hard patch all the lights pointing at a particular area of the stage to adjacent dimmer channels and patch them on the desk as one generic colour mixing fixture. You will then have one fader controlling the intensity of light reaching that area and can use individual emitter ‘colour’ control to alter the quality. It might be that you will indeed be controlling colour if you have incandescent sources with warm, cool and other gels in them, but you can also alter the balance of left, right and back.
Until some pseudo fixtures are built into the personality list for this mode of operation, you will need to adopt a convention for which ‘colour emitter’ controls which colour and direction of light. Your stage map can then be arranged to show where the light is hitting the stage rather than where it is coming from.
There’s potential here for not only drastically reducing the ‘fixture’ count but also simplifying the operation and keeping the tungsten lovers happy.