thanks for the reply.
I'm 100% onboard the idea of wearing out the patchpanel and patch cables instead of the expensive gear that is behind it. there will be very expensive stuff that our engineers need to switch between; its a lab environment and we're testing/developing new stuff that is at the 10gig speed and faster. om3 seems to be the main player, with om4 being the 100gbe preferred media. this is for short cables; all inside one rack, never going farther than about half a rack, vertically.
some work can be done by playing vlan games in the backbone and access switches; but sometimes our guys want to bypass that and 'go direct' to ensure that no other stuff is in between. in those cases, you really do have to allow people to move patch cables.
the sfp+ 'gbic thingies' have a much lower rated mating lifetime. 200 or so, or less. and they plug into the 'expensive gear' so we want to leave that alone, as much as we can. for this, I'm ruling out those DAC cable thingies.
I'm kind of new to this 10gbe and faster world
before I recommend that we go with some kind of patch panel, I would like to have more than 'a feeling' why I think its a good idea. and I can't find anything online that really gives battle experience with this. maybe that's a good thing, perhaps it means that they JustPlainWork(tm) and, if so, I'm happy to design them into our test racks.