To help bring a little closure to the thread, I was able to get it to work as I had originally tried. I had to remove several channels from the Dante Controller matrix until it would accept the CL5 as a transmitter. I’m not sure why, but once that was done, it worked fine.
You can use the CL5 as a transmitter - it appears in the Dante Transmitter expandable list when the console is online - and it behaved just like the RIO boxes. On the console, I assigned the Dante network on the direct outs of each channel I wanted to grab, ultimately a mix of RIO inputs and CL5 outputs.
Thanks for responding - any information we can get out there is a help, I think. Generally, I find the documentation between Steinberg and Yamaha to be frustratingly incomplete.