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Eric, I'll answer that question as best I can, although I admit I'm not a huge gearhead so you may have to take it with a grain of salt. Anyway, here goes.
Is there a cheaper way? That depends on what you actually planning on doing with all that gear. Do you need to crank audio out of all of it, simultaneously, or do you generally record one track or a few tracks at a time like most of us do? Think carefully about that and, if it's the second choice, consider that a $50 patchbay might be almost as useful when it comes to your workflow (all you'd really have to do is move two short cables by 1 inch to change what you're recording). A mixer won't help you record them all at once anyway, it'll just allow you to play them all and record... the mix.
So maybe you could get away a lot cheaper. But if that's not for you, then no, you're not going to find a sound module with that many ins/outs for under $1500, and the mixer will cost the least.
The question you should be asking though (IMO) isn't just "what's the cheapest way to connect it all". You should be asking "what do I need, and what do each of the options offer?" Keep in mind that you're getting what you pay for. That $750 mixer offers a lot less than the $1500 MOTU 2408mk3 and/or 24I/O:
1. As I mentioned earlier, the mixer won't enable you to record all of those instruments at once. An appropriate sound module will.
2. Audio interfaces may not have aux outs per se, but they have virtual mixers which will enable you to configure any port as an sidechain (aux). In addition, you can set up internal ASIO strips the same way, which would allow you to put software effects in the middle of the "chain", effectively giving you the best of both worlds. Bring your JP into the interface, stick your favourite distortion/delay/whatever on it, then route it back to your hardware compressor.
3. A good audio interface will also give you digital I/O (ADAT, S/PDIF, etc.). This may or may not matter to you; I personally have a digital receiver on the output connected via S/PDIF, and there are all sorts of digital sources you might want to capture some time in the future. There's no noise and no loss of quality when you use digital connections, as opposed to analog. Who knows, future gear may have digital outs or maybe some current gear already does.
4. Unless your studio is entirely hardware, you already have to spend money on an audio interface, and you're probably going to want one that's high quality if you plan on recording, even from a mixer. You probably already have one, but still, if you're comparing costs, you ought to subtract what you already paid for your current audio interface to be "fair".
All said, it really just depends on what you're trying to do, as I said earlier. The main problem with using a mixer is that it kind of ties you to the hardware side. It's not easy to have hardware and software instruments/effects coexist this way, as it is with a higher-end audio interface, but that may not be something you care about.
If you want to record individual tracks from all that gear, and you want to be able to easily mix hardware and software, you should seriously consider a good audio interface even though the cost is higher. If you don't care about any of that, by all means, go for the mixer - it's definitely the cheaper option.
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