I tested this "ring" system out and...
I think daisy chains are a brilliant idea that would help reduce clutter and cost, it would be even better if it had ring type topology to help with redundancy, can you test this Phil? Meaning the second miner goes back to the router and if any one cable is unplugged the miners still are connected.
It took the entire subnet down. I tried it with all the A10's in DHCP as well as all being set to static and both resulted in an immediate loss of all machines, once I disconnected one end of the ring everything came back up.
I've sent the suggestion to Avalon hopefully they would be able to implement something like this as it would greatly help with large daisy chains, I don't think anyone would want to run a 254 daisy chain if the second miner could loose power and then 252 are not working because of that one.