just wanted to follow up on this, i found this answer SQM, cake, piece_of_cake.qos — low performance (500 Mbps/500 Mbps connectivity) - #2 by hnyman, just tried it and it seems to work much better
i get sqm benefits when the line is saturated by a bandwidth saturating client i'm running,
i'll keep looking into it
i'd appreciate any thoughts/suggestions anyway