Well, on the whole, I'm not that concerned whether the guys at the top of the pyramid pay for their gear or not. Let's face it, Jorden Rudess is probably making enough to afford whatever he wants, discount or no...

But to compare hardware to software is pretty difficult, these days. The lead time on bringing a hardware keyboard to market is such that it always guarantees that it is a generation behind computers in sheer horsepower, not to mention the peripherals that seem to get changed on a monthly basis If you add that to the software innovations like Mega-triggering or rules-based sample triggering, that require massive HDs, streaming samples, and load times a fraction of any hardware system, and hybrid sound generation that is only limited by your soundcard (24/96, anyone?), you can see what a struggle it is to make a keyboard with even a fraction of a well-tuned computer system's capabilities...

But to get back to an earlier point... I can see the point in making a keyboard with highly adaptable sound generation capabilities, but let us not forget what these things are really needed for. It isn't the studio, where computers rule. It is for LIVE music making. As such, can ANYONE explain to me why on earth you try to put a DAW inside a live music keyboard?

Why waste the R&D money on shoe-horning a capability that, firstly, everybody with the money for an $8000+ keyboard already HAS a far better DAW if they need one, and secondly has virtually no use in a live keyboard (unless you plan on doing karaoke with it! ).

You want to put something into a live keyboard we can use? How about a sampler that loads up at TODAY'S computer speeds, not something that takes minutes (that we don't have to spare) to load up the generous RAM. Gigabytes of Ram are USELESS when they take minutes (if not hours) to load up. Scrap the DAW. Give us a sampler we can use...