I worked for a company a while back, which had plenty of money, and talent, who when they decided to pursue a certain new concept creating a product, would assign several separate teams to each independently create their own version of that product. Then there was an internal competition to pick the best between them. It was a difficult process, but did generate some startling new ideas.
Korg has at least three new product engineering teams ( probably more ), one in Japan, one in the US, and another startup in Deutschland.
We don’t really know what Tats Team has been doing. What if they assigned the task of making a great FM synth to them too. Maybe that team took the longer path to development, but now is ready with the winner ?
Speculation is what this thread runs on.