After a great deal of thought I decided to go for the Nektar Panorama P1. The reason for this is I managed to find a new one for £150 and thought that this would give me a valuable insight into how I would get on with a control surface and maybe later upgrade to something more substantial like the Icon Qcon Pro 2.
I did have a little adventure setting the P1 up. I set up the Pi midi ports but I forgot to set the right Windows midi ports with the resultant aberrant behaviour. I also had trouble moving remotely across the tracks as it would jump randomly from some tracks to a previous track. A visit to a very efficient support immediately spotted the problem. I had a number of tracks with the same name as I had just copied a track twice and omitted to rename them. When I rename the tracks everything worked perfectly.
Mixing a set of four guitar parts made me realise what I had been missing through using a mouse. The endless faffing about to balance them was done very quickly with multiple real faders. The P1 does not have motorised faders, but the excellent LED screen shows a red line where the DAW fader is currently and the fader on the P1 is inert until it passes the red mark.
It works well with plugins and you can midi learn the most important controls very easily. Inserts, sends, instruments etc
It’s not perfect so don’t bother trying to add an insert vst if you have a list as long as mine.
So thank you to smapmap for pointing me in that direction. It really will help my tendency towards tendinitis. I guess I am now part of the DAW Controller club. My worry is that it will not end here.