You can put the Felix on a higher surface (and even mount a mic stand adapter to it) and control the footswitches with a remote footswitch. At this point, I'm using the F2B for tonal shaping and the Felix for EQ necessary for the room, etc., so once it's set, I don't touch it. Most of the time, it's flat with the high pass set to what seems like a good frequency to get rid of the mud.
As far as use of parametric EQ's, what you refer to as the Tom Dowd method has always been the method that everyone I know has always done. It's always struck me as the obvious way to use a parametric. Cutting what you don't need is always the best thing to do. It preserves headroom and dynamic range.
