Heyo,
Thought I'd post some positive news for anyone who was interested.
We're running Casper Suite 9.4 on a mac mini server (10.9.4) and currently have several restriction profiles out to students, as well as some webclips and a global HTTP proxy (smoothwall). All our student iPads are in DEP and use managed distribution with VPP.
I upgraded an iPad mini (first gen) to iOS 8 yesterday and it appears everything works just fine, which is a relief given last year's débâcle. All profiles are there (albeit in a slightly different menu structure in settings), but yeah. My biggest wish? That the caching servers Apple pushed as such wonderful engineering, don't actually cache iOS 8...