PCBs have just arrived from PCBway, huge thanks to them for supporting this project by supplying the PCB's. They have come out looking great, everything is very sharp and the finish is wonderful. Their customer service was very helpful and responsive which was great.

The boards got solderpaste applied with a stencil also from PCBway, then loaded up with components and cooked on a hotplate. First things I noticed while assembling was that the side buttons werent exactly the right ones, but I just bent the support pins to make them full smd. Another thing was that when doing the side with the buttons and encoder its best to do the buttons then place the encoder on and solder it as the hot air has a hard time getting into the middle of the encoder.  

The board worked as soon as I plugged it in (though I needed to remove a stray 0.2 ohm resistor), I could see the CH340 and SD card reader pop up. Which means the hub was working perfectly. So far ive tested the codec, which performs even better then the last version, the display, buttons, encoder and SD card reader. For the reader I wrote a short program to switch the analog switches to connect the reader and sd card and power on the sd card. Immediately a flash device appeared on my computer and I could drag and drop easily. Im only using a speed class 10 micro sd so I got 12MB/s write and 30MB/s read but I suspect it can go much higher with the correct sd cards, the chip itself can handle up to 2TB micro sd cards. Evenly this comparatively slow speed was enough to transfer 170 .m4a songs over in about a minute which I was quite happy with. Of course the sd card also works fine with the ESP32, I even got exfat working so big capacity cards can now be supported. 

Other then that I don't really have much else to report, everything works and its been a great success, I couldn't have hoped for a better outcome so far. Now im just back to writing software which is going to take forever for me. If someone has 10s of hours of free time on their hands give me a ring because the 1s and 0s scare me. Thanks again to PCBway for supplying pcbs for this project, I do really appreciate it.