All the CAT5 cables in the system have been certified in place. When I do get back on site I will check the error counters on the optical ports. However if I had a optical link with a problem, I would expect as many or more errors from the Nion CM1s complaining about Cobranet issues, but there are none. This seems to be localized to the ConMan node.
As for the switch throttling the traffic, I do use CoS on the network to give CobraNet absolute priority above other network traffic. I do classify CAB control traffic, which is technically Ethernet 0x8819 but not audio traffic, down to 'normal' priority.