Well, for Redbook discs, there’re plenty of very good non-dCS Transport options out there in the market, Esoteric being one of them. But if you’re looking for an SACD transport, then dCS is the only viable option due to the (proprietary) encryption required in transporting DSD bitstreams off discs.
By the way, I was curious about “ESL2”, seems it’s not a standard by any means, turns out ESL2 stands for “ES-Link 2”; an Esoteric proprietary format that carries SACD DSD bitstreams from their transports to their DACs in a 24-bit PCM encrypted format. So, no ESL2 mode won’t be compatible with dCS. 
However, Esoteric’s standard AES/XLR interfaces do appear to support AES3 compliant Dual AES (only needed when Redbook discs are upsampled on the transport of course) 