Can't Skip Channels in ME-500

Per the documentation, the ME-500’s use the first 16 channels being sent to the MEs to determine what they have. If I wanted an ME channel that was assigned to nothing, I’d like to leave that channel unpatched. The problem is, suppose I leave ME channel 5 unpatched. What happens is everything shifts up by 1 (so ME channel 6 becomes channel 5 on the ME-500’s) which messes things up. In order to “skip” that channel I have to patch the ME channel to a channel on the desk that contains nothing. Can we update this to allow for skipping channels?