Yes, I agree with you completely Shantzis62. A solution could be a Br Board with a T-Cobbler cable attached to it, and yes, I am also surprised something like that was not offered from the beginning. It should still allow the Io Board to be used on top of the Cobbler Br Board.
If you are willing to do some soldering, I used an old 24-pin Rasppi T-Cobbler, cut off one end of the cable and soldered the 24 wires of the ribbon cable to a Br Board. That gave me 17 general purpose connections which I could use on a breadboard. It is not pretty, but it works. If you are careful with the soldering, you can still attach the Io Board on top of your new T-Cobbler Br Board.
My plan is to buy the Br element and solder male headers in all the holes to give me access to all of the GPIO. It’ll be a lot of soldering, but I like the idea of having access to all of those pins!
I took a look at the connectors last night and it seems that they are only made in surface mount. I’m holding out that somebody makes them in a cable connector, but 4UConnectors, the people that are sourcing the board connectors, don’t show a cable connector and I couldn’t find them at all at digikey or mouser. (though I only took a cursory look to be honest). 4UConnectors has large MOQs so I was hoping they wholesale to someone, but I haven’t located a retailer yet.
For prototyping, it’s shouldn’t be too unwieldy to have a male connector surface mounted on a small PCB with a ribbon cable output. The connectors are 50 pins each but I recollect that only 32 are used on each bank. Big breadboard required if you are requiring multiple banks.
Or maybe just some spring loaded pins for use on the Br board.