Rack vocoders: front or rear panel connectors?

[electrospeaker]

I've noticed that many rack mounted vocoders have their input and output connectors front-panel mounted while others have them on the rear panel (as with most rack mounted synths), and a few vocoders have both...

How do people set up and use their rack vocoders? I'm building a rack vocoder myself and haven't quite decided what to do about the output and input connectors.

[PHOBoS]

I can't really comment on vocoders in particular but it depends a bit on your setup. Connectors in the back gives a cleaner look but if you want
to keep your setup flexible they can be hard to access, so in that case front connectors are more useful. But you could also use a patchbay
which gives you the best of both options.

[electrospeaker]

Yes, that makes sense, and I do actually have an audio patchbay which I'm thinking might come in handy for this.
I've had a keyboard vocoder (Roland VP-330) in the past, but this rack mounted vocoder will be more flexible, though I have no experience with the latter.

I have this idea that in addition to using a mic (for the speech input) another option would be to use pre-recorded speech (i.e. a voice track from a computer's DAW software), and that would be handy to connect from a line-level input on the rear (via an audio patchbay if I wanted to use another source). A mic input on the front could be added with a "break rear connection" if inserted, in case I was to use a mic or a different line source instead of the above source.
And for the excitation section I'm thinking a rack synth output would likely be attached more or less permanently using its line-level excitation input.

I see that EMS vocoders had both line and mic 1/4" jacks on the front panel (for both speech and excitation inputs) but also speech and excitation XLR inputs on the rear panel (though I don't know if they were line or mic level). While on another popular hardware vocoder; the Roland SVC-350, all connectors are found on the front panel.
I'm just thinking that if I can do away with lots of cables hanging out from the front panel and instead have them out of the way (using the rear panel) I would choose that, but only if I don't loose out on some useful way of hooking things up or using the vocoder.... so please chime in if you have a rack vocoder and explain how you use it

But how about the vocoder output? Why do many vocoders have these on the front-panel? After all, won't a vocoder be permanently plugged into a mixer or patch-bay in the same way a rack-mounted synth is? And none of those come with front-panel outputs