Cat6 cable and CAT5e patch panel

Cat6 cable more awkward to use (stiffer and thicker, larger bend radius) it won't get you any more speed.

For home use cat5e will carry 1Gb traffic, while cat6 or cat6a can carry one particular flavour (802.3an) of 10Gb, twisted pair for 10Gb hasn't caught on in datacentres (they tend to use fibre or direct attached coax) so I doubt it will ever become cheap enough to catch on for home use.

Probably in a few years time the Nbase-T technology giving 2.5Gb or 5Gb over cat5e will filter down for home usage.

Using the cat5e patch panel may mean that the network as a whole would fail to meet the CAT6 standards. However that may also be true even with a cat6 panel - it depends on how well its installed and tested.

So unless you have some pressing need to run a certified cat6 network (and have the equipment to test it) I would not worry about it.

Cat5e will run gig ethernet without a problem. About the only domestic use I can think of where cat6 would be an advantage is when using pairs of cables with baluns to shove video or hdmi signals over the network connections and the better noise margins of CAT6 can get longer distances without picture quality issues.

^^^^This. To be honest, I'd just use it and not worry.

not a lot unless you are at the limits.

We're using it - it's annoyingly harder to get than fibre, but it's fairly mainstream these days Cisco 32 port 10GbE FEXes to distribute for us.

The 3850 XS switches seem like hen's teeth at the moment, I'd hate to be waiting for something even harder to get hold off, I presume the mGig switches will become popular as a way of feeding higher speeds over existing copper to access points now WiFi is getting faster than gigabit.