Wow, thanks again for the input and the insights in the inner working of a Power Supply regarding update cycles etc.!
To get a better grasp of the situation: The stuff is for my little home lab, where I also will use it to explore things- so usage for partly educational purpose ;-)
And, as my existing equipment is not bad, it is whether not connectable at all (some small <100€ Power supplies, some of the linear and old), Multimeters (my bench DMMs are more than 20 years old), and some new stuff that has Ethernet.
Those Ethernet-capable devices are a Korad electronic load and some entry level Rigol scope. So for me the though was, that I could look while expanding my gear for remote control for recurring tasks I would perform, where repeatability makes sense or is crucial to the task.
As for connectivity, Ethernet for me is easier to maintain than a load of USB devices, and in my experience less prone to error that USB->Serial connections, at least at the level of swtiching/cabling involved. Not speaking tho for the inner goods or implementation in the device(s) themselves.
In my last job I was also responsible for administering the OOBMS platform in a datacenter, mainly consisting of cyclades TS3000 console servers, and some power monitoring devices where we used Modbus over RS485 and over serial converters to Ethernet (to the main Server)- so I eperienced some share of stuff that can happen in this field.
Anyway ,for the upcoming projects even a mediocre response time or readout behaviour of the mentioned Siglent PS are ok enough for the task- when I do some comparison and tests of charging/discharging camera batteries and similar stuff, I am talking about changing parameters and getting them every 1s or 5s, so no need for immediate response. Also some measurements via other multimeters would be taken somewhere, that would be deemed authoritative for the task at hand, so I do not need to rely on precision measurements from the PS itself.
Interesting idea to get some USB->GPIB converter, or Ethernet ->GPIB.
I admit the the open source Xyphro GPIB to USB looks nice, so I would really like to get some hands-on experience- Penguin compatibility is nice, because there is another factor that I took into account whilst planning purchases: I will as one of the upcoming projects rig up an old PC I assembled for cheap from really solid parts as a Unix-based Workstation under FreeBSD and also do some measurement work here.
So Ethernet/LXI could be the protol that will involve the least number of drivers and proprietary windows programs to get some communication done.
Ethernet->LXI converters are a cool idea, I would like to hear how well they perform under non-Windows environments.