I've never been a fan of the Swiss Army Knife approach to synths (or any other kinds of tools). For me it's the GUI that's often the deciding factor, I want to craft a sound to fulfil a particular role with the minimum of fuss, and I am not a fan of doom-scrolling through presets. If it were up to me every trainee synthesist would first be locked in a room for a month with nothng but a Korg MS10 and a couple of patch cables - only after you have wrung every last drop of musical expression from that will I consider intiating you to the exalted heights of a second oscillator!!
Tinkering with bells and whistles can be fun, but creative use of limited resources often works best for me - if my CPU is having to work overtime, then it's usually a good sign that I'm trying to flog a dead horse and need to reconsider something more fundamental about the music (even if you're a raging
Squarepusher fanboi like me, you can always learn a thing or two from old-masters like
Vangelis)
For a bass sound, just gimme direct hands on control of a bunch of oscillators, a filter or two, and some audio-rate modulation or distortion for some growl and howl. In most cases, if that's not enough to get me dancing about, then the line isn't sitting in the pocket well enough or is outright just not funky enough (99.99% of listeners do not care about, and almost certainly cannot even hear, the result of the last three hours that you spent getting oscillator fifteen's waveform absolutely tickety boo!)
For leads. No need to go over the top with fancy gizmos and gadgets - but, whatever there is, I want to brutally enslave it to my modulation wheels, aftertouch, and anything else I can kick, stamp, wiggle or wave at. I want to be able to actually play this thing with as many expressive degrees of freedom as possible so that I can communicate emotions with it in real time.
For pads, just gimme a quick way to dial in the frequency spectrum that's in need of padding, some dials for "hand wavy" stuff like width and swooshiness, and I'm fine. I don't want my pad synth robbing me of all the fun of adding the sprinkles and fairy dust to an arrangement - I'll roll my own tempo-synced twinkly bits thanks.
Organs. Churchy, Tranny, or Hammond with near as dammit the original controls - ain't broke, don't need fixin'
Drums. It's all about the dynamics - velocity should be mappable to everything and all the other things!
FX. I have plenty already thanks. I spent ages crafting that patch; I am not ashamed of it; let it stand proud; it shall not be cloaked beneath layers of algorithmic fairy dust. Or, if it actually is a bit shit; time to strip it back to solid metal and rebuild; ain't no point puttin' lipstick on a pig.
Oh yes. Trog's back and he's in one of his funny moods!
(I really shouldn't listen to Squarepusher so soon before bed-time!)