Upsampling in software before the DS means you are listening to the sound of that upsampler rather than the upsampler in the DS. You may prefer one over the other (and either may be right for you) but most people would contend that part of the advantage for the DS over MQA is it’s upsampling of CDs. Tho you may prefer the sound of HQPlayer at the outset I’m not terribly surprised that you like MQA compared to it. Also there’s no such thing as “absolutely no USB noise”: all connections have noise, we just pick a noise level that we find acceptable with tweaks. (And at times with different tweaks we are just picking noise with one character compared to noise with a different character.)
So far we can’t get the noise from MQA to not affect the sound of the DS in a negative way. If (and at this point probably when) MQA is allowed to run before the final DAC we may be able to let MQA fans enjoy what they like from MQA by having MQA running in the playing software or the streamer, etc. without degrading what the DS does well.