Thanks for your input, and sorry for not responding sooner. For some reason LAVAG does not like to send me notifications, even when enabled. which means I have to manually check for responses.
It sounds like we are on the same page, in that there are different solutions for different problems. As someone who teaches LabVIEW Core 1 and 2 on a regular basis, I find the basic producer/consumer can be overwhelming to new developers. My feeling is the producer/consumer, and state machine, are a good foundations on which to start. As skills and application complexity increase the QMH is the next step, and so on. Hopefully all the loops have matching decor.