D'vision:

My post was intended to illustrate that you do not always need the latest and greatest technology to accomplish the necessary tasks. You can read into it whatever you want: that the earth is flat, that JFK was assassinated by the Queen of England, or that 2+2=17.

The majority of the arrangers are indeed repackaging exercises, with the emphasis being made on the user-friendliness, and ease of on-stage operation, as opposed to utilizing the new, unproven, and mostly useless musically, synth technologies - those are primarily used by the pre-sequenced acts. There is nothing wrong with the workstations: if you find them to be useful tools - more power to you.

I have outgrown the synthesizer about 15 years ago, and find that the joy of playing music is best afforded by an arranger keyboard. It is geared to helping one play spontaneously with an accompaniment of a virtual band. If you don't like it, that is fine with me too.

Have the arrangers improved from 10 years ago? - absolutely: the sound quality, the configurablity, storage and playback capabilities are all much better than they used to be. They contain more features useful for single or duo performers, such as audio inputs with effects, and vocal harmonizers. Are they "real" improvements? That is subjective - they may be real to me, but not to you, so let's agree to disagree here.

Are they revolutionary - not by a long shot, nor they have to be, IMHO. You can make an electronic violin, but I doubt that it will be more playable than a Stradivarius (or even a run of the mill $2000 instrument).

Is there room for improvement? I'd say that all of today's high-end instrument have traded off some of the user-friendliness for flexibility. It is the details of each individual implementation which make a difference. A packaging of a high-end keyboard can always incorporate more features.

Would I want to see Karma-like features in an arranger? Perhaps, but in my limited amount of interaction with Karma (tried it in the stores quite a few times), I found it not a terribly useful tool musically.

I am sure some of your ideas are good, but, like you said, they are awfully hard to see behind your obnoxious attitude. Perhaps if you toned it down a bit, your ideas would be taken more seriously.