Well surprise, surprise, surprise....
The MIDI templates that are released with SAC 3.1 have the channel reorder issue fixed. You can reorder channel strips and all works.
Bob also put in some kind of data thinning when SAC is performing a scene recall with a timed fade. This solved my original issues with the BCF templates (and one of the reasons I really wanted the MIDI CC templates in the first place), which would cause the BCF faders to spaz out during timed fade Scene recalls. I even ran multiple timed fades simultaneously while moving some faders on the surface by hand. And all worked well, faders all responded... no crashes, etc..
The faders do kind of "jump" in spurts now during the timed fade, but I'll take that any day over the previous behavior.
So, gotta say, I know that may not be all that helpful to some, but it will be VERY helpful to me and I'm glad to see the new update.
It also means I hopefully will be bugging Joe less to create custom templates for me!
Fixing the bug with the SAC-SAW link will be helpful as well. Before if SAW crashed the only way to make it all work again was to completely shut down and close SAC and start all over. Obviously it would be better if SAW didn't crash, but at least when it does, you can restart it now without having to kill SAC and start all over.