The modern WS still has a few steps to go through before they approach the operational ease and flexibility of arrangers. They ARE getting there, but only about halfway, IMO.

The main thing is, while you can have all the chord following and multiple patterns to allow you to play different sections of a song, there are still considerable difficulties in making them flow into each other.

For instance, in a WS, you want a fill suddenly, you HAVE to ask for it a bar in advance. Ask for it on beat 2, and unlike an arranger, which will immediately jump into the fill, starting on beat 2, nothing will happen until the NEXT bar, when it will then play the ENTIRE fill.

And there is no such thing as an auto-fill. In other words, ask the WS to go from Arp 1 to Arp 2, it will switch at the end of the bar that you asked it to do so to the next pattern. But it won't jump immediately to the fill and THEN go to the next pattern. Everything HAS to be cued up in advance, and everything needs to run through the entire length of its pattern before you can have another pattern start.

So, for instance, you can't set one pattern to be the intro, set that it only plays once, and automatically go to whatever pattern is the equivalent of Variation 1. In other words, you can't give patterns destinations.

Then there's the issue of inversions. WS's, on the whole, may recognize what chord you are playing (although their chord recognition algorithms are far less sophisticated than arrangers), but change inversion, they rarely follow that. Nor are they capable of recognizing what chord TYPE you are playing (maj/min/7th, etc.) and substitute different patterns for those. Everything needs cue-ing by hand, and everything a bar in advance.

But listen to most kids music (if you can!). The real thing still has Intros, fills and Variations, Breaks and endings, and far more variety than is easily performed LIVE with a modern WS.

That is our foot in the door.

But before the kids embrace the arranger paradigm, first it needs stripping of EVERYTHING that could possibly link it to us! ALL the old styles have got to go. All the nomenclature that would even remind them that they are playing their grandparents' arranger needs to go. The cheap speakers need to go (they wouldn't handle a sub-bass even if they were on!). They need maybe a dozen more knobs adding, so they can twiddle the filter cutoff or LFO speed as they play.

Then they need easy incorporation of user audio loops (BK-9 has that nailed!), and all front panel controls need to be able to be sent as USB MIDI to whatever VSTi rig they are running on their laptop...

It would sell like hotcakes, but only if they don't KNOW they are playing an arranger!