Hey Chamai, quite a few rants from me about this in various posts. I've always used a mixer in much the same way I'd set up a live mix with a PA. It does give you more control and also lets you keep the ADA analogue signal all the way to the cabs. The Alesis that Soloist is using (relatively new offering) is a perfect choice though only has one stereo send return, so good for one stereo effect (or you can chain effects within the loop). But it is 1RU rack mount so nice and tidy.
I have an old Yamaha AM802, 8 inputs and 3 (mono) FX/Aux sends. It works well but where to mount it so you can leave it cabled up. I have mine velcro'd (industrial strength velcro) to the bottom of my rack (tidyer than when I used to gaph it to the bottom (or earlier I gaphed it to the back lid and flipped it over onto the top)). Also my MP2 has stereo parallel loop (similar to Alesis MM8). Mixers are basically virtical input strips (channels) and horizontal bus lines which the channels feed. The main bus is the L/R mix bus, on AM802 the are also 3 FX/Aux buses so you can control how much of each channel is fed to any of the buses, Fader feeds the mix bus and FX/Aux send knobs feed the Aux buses. Main mix goes to poweramp, Aux buses 1 and 2 go to Quadverb L/R in, L/R out return to 2 channels, Aux 3 goes to IPS33 in, out A/B again down 2 channels (which also get sent to QV via Aux 1 and 2). Careful you don't send them back to themselves or they feedback (badly LOL) but this is mixing 101 stuff. I also have a Midiverb 4 in the MP2 loop but haven't used it much yet.
One down side of MP1 loop (apart from being mono) (same for most amp loops BTW) is it's serial so all your signal goes into the loop. This isn't so bad with analogue FXs but not the best way with digital FXs (eg the first thing a TC GMaj does is A/D the signal so there goes the analogue). There's a number of post from myself and MikeB about this and we proved it sounds much better not committing you whole signal to the TC. Mike uses an ART split mix to make a stereo loop after his MP1 (details in other posts). This is probably the cheapest solution and the ART is passive so no power required for it. The MM8 is the tidiest (I just wish it had more sends) and not sure what they cost (Soloist ?). I've been designing some thing similar (in my head) for years. I was thinking 2 RU, all tube input and 6 sends.
I you're happy with a desk style mixer, the new Carvin range looks interesting. They have a 12 channel with 6 monitor sends and 2 FX sends IIRC. The difference between a monitor send and FX send is whether the signal fed into the send comes from before of after the channels fader/vol. In live PA situations, you don't want the channel vol affecting the monitor vol but you do want it affecting the FX vol. For what we are discussing here, once it's set you rarely touch it so using monitor or FX sends would make little difference. So IMO the Carvin would be a good choice and allow you to "parallel loop" 4 stereo or 8 mono FXs and send any of their outputs to any of the others as required/desired.