"A Gator riding shotgun on a LIN bus of slaves

I don't understand what you are trying to say. 3 of my node boards from each miniboard x 3 miniboards per order seems to come to to the same number 9.

I was simply pointing out that it wasn't necessary to resort to the three jumper wires by putting the RJ45s on the same end of the board and the yield of three nodes per miniboard was the same. I wasn't actually "comparing" anything, just suggesting one way to make your board a little easier to build.