Bill, each new arranger comes out with a bunch of styles that are better than the last... So old PSR styles are not as detailed and dynamic as newer ones. One of the things about the sound of newer Yamaha styles is, firstly the Mega voices. Yes, unfortunately, they DO make all the difference. Without them, Yamaha styles are, to be honest, no better than anything else. The realism on the guitar parts, and bass parts is what sets them apart.
And newer Yamaha drumsets use newer, velocity split drum sounds that make for MUCH better dynamics. Without a soundset that reflects these cross-switches (in exactly the same velocity points) the translation is poorer for it.
In all fairness, for all the Yamaha's vaunted advantage of a superior choice of third party styles, to be honest, few of them come anywhere CLOSE to the standards of the ROM styles, and so few even use the Mega voices the way the factory ROM ones do... But yes, Yamaha certainly have a HUGE selection of inferior styles to chose from!
Let's just put it this way... unlike Wersi, who actually licensed the Yamaha style engine from Yamaha, and worked themselves to make sure it works well with the Wersi, the MS's back-dooring of the same feature, leaving it once again to the poor user (who is hardly qualified to do this) to make all the tweaks just seems so second-rate.
And, I'm afraid, it still doesn't excuse the MS actually NEEDING the LiveStyler to shore up it's own style set. The best styles are designed for the soundset they were written on. Translations are, on the whole, NEVER as satisfactory as the original. The MS needs a sufficiently good sounding style set that it's owners don't NEED LiveStyler.
Play me an MS LiveStyler style that sounds as good as it's T3 equivalent (or even it's PSR equivalent!
) and I'll concede the point. But playing half-baked translations on a keyboard this advanced seems like an awful waste...