Tonex as a distortion pedal

[MarkoMan]

I would like to buy a Tonex pedal. Currently, I have a guitar and the following pedals on my pedalboard: wah, tuner, tubescreamer, mobius, timeline, bigsky, and then I run everything into a tube amp. I want to have more different distortion and overdrive pedals, so I'm considering replacing the tubescreamer with the Tonex. My questions are:

1. Can I use the Tonex for this purpose if I turn off the speaker simulations and its preamp?

2. Can I control all my 4 MIDI pedals (mobius, timeline, bigsky, tonex) with the Boss ES-5 switcher? Tonex supposedly isn't MIDI thru enabled, but could I use it at the end of the chain?

3. Can I then use the ES-5 to create patches for each song individually and also different distortions for different parts of a song within a song? For example, can I make the distortion patch on the Tonex for the solo part of a song louder than for the verse, so that I wouldn’t need a booster?

Thanx people,

Marko

[MarkoMan]

Update: I got the ToneX. It works great as an overdrive or distortion pedal, which I then run into an amp. In this clip, I'm switching a bit between the original Tube Screamer and ToneX's 'Tube Screamer simulation' – the difference is really minimal, so I'm quite happy. I'm curious, why don't more people use it this way? One more thing: has anyone done a comparison to see if this sounds any worse than if I had gotten the X-Drive?

https://youtube.com/shorts/yNK1ZLQWyhg?si=ZWhE8VXm_nOoGUR_