Thank you for your response!
We tried mounting the share over /var/spool/asterisk/monitor and moving the files is not a problem. The only thing I cannot seem to conquer is getting the built-in CDR report to show the download/listen icons/links. I did not use fuse though, but after seeing your suggestion I did some reading up on it and will definitely use that going forward.
I think at this point, since we are going to the newest FreePBX with asterisk 13 very soon, is to go ahead and get one loaded in a VM and poke it with a stick a few times see if we can't get it working the way we desire. I can just move the old recordings to my Archive server and let my quality control guys access it with samba.
I will look into the "cache recorded sound files" setting too as that sounds like an easier way to create a fail-safe should the mount become unreachable for some reason.
Thanks again for your input! you helped me realize that even if we did fix it that there is no guarantee that it would work the same in asterisk 13. So now we are going to get deeper into the new one and see what differences there are. Instead of trying to recreate the wheel.
- Christian