I have the same problems as you describe with firewire not communicating with my MacBook Pro.
The problem you describe: "The screen on the Universal Control is also ghosted out" I managed to solve in the mixers system menue page 5 where it says "Permissions". Check that your computer or iPad shows up in "Device" and set "Mix" to FOH and "Other" to "Ch reset". That should solve the problem since this is a network issue and not a firewire issue.
Hope it works for you, it did for me. Hopefully someone sends a sollution to the firewireproblem so I can record via firewire to Capture.
Kjell