Sorry, no advice. Just a partial explanation.
I think the problem is that it views 127 as 99.3% (127/128), so it never reaches the 100% that you would need to get an easy octave. You should be able to adjust the range setting to allow for this. (don't know about your wacky 8 digits).
The H8000 was designed as a studio device rather than a live performance instrument, so its remote inputs are mainly intended for parameter setting, rather than fast modulation. I recall that a few presets do have pedal inputs, but the above applies to the rest.
To act as a live performance device, you need very different dynamics, which are hard to obtain from a multiprocessor unit like the H8000. In addition you need smoothing of the modulated parameters to avoid "zipper" noise, which is difficult to achieve with the number of parameters on many H8000 programs. Horses and courses.
