I’m going to throw the Korg Wavestate into the list for good sound design. Affordable but incredibly deep. Bit of a learning curve but worth it in the end.
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What are your thoughts on the Instruō Seashell?
I find if money is not an obstacle this is a nice tabletop synth with a cool UI/UX since it’s hybrid.
The whole series (opsix,modwave,wavestate) are great synthesizers but it is annoying to work with them in-depth. Sequencing and p-locks (or was it only motion sequencing, cant remember) are very unintuitive and fiddly unlike with Elektron for example.
Only owned Opsix of the series myself and it is a sound design/ambient monster with its 90s release envelopes per operator and very open structure to build sounds with for sure. I didn’t feel it was very fun to design sounds with although, due to the sequencer implementation. Ability to mute sequencer steps was fun. It left my arsenal with mixed feelings about the platform - it did sound better than digitone though, FX are very good.
If I had to compare it to the Digitone, Digitone wins easily. Multitimbrality, 128 step sequencers per track, modulation per track (128 bar long LFOs) and so on. So if you think it as a synthesizer rathr than groovebox, I feel it offers more. I think the possibilities with p-locks are endless if looking it as a synth rather than groovebox. I’m pretty sure nothing currently compares to the Digitone with its sequencing layered p-locks ability for sound design.
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Yeah right, watch this!
John Bowen’s Solaris Desktop
https://johnbowen.com/new/purchase/
Fantastic UI, tremendously flexible and ridiculously fun. Also sounds damn good.
If you’ve got one of those Sonic Core SHARC boxes lying around (nobody should), you can give the sound engine alone a spin as well.
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If it was me and I was the OP, I would definitely be getting the Melbourne Instruments Nina. It looks so fun to build patches with and then morph between two and see the rotary controls do their magic. What could be better after a hard day of software-based sound design.
The obvious disclaimer is that I do not own one 
. However, I watched 20 minutes of the Jamiroquai keyboard player playing patches on it so I am pretty sure that qualifies me to make a recommendation 
If you already mentioned Iridium and it is in your budget then I suggest to go with it.
I own Quantum MK2 which is pretty much the same and believe me - this thing is a beast. It has 5 sound generator engines - wavetabel, analog-like osscilators, samplng/granular, physical modelling and FM. On each of 2 layers you can use:
6 envelopes,
7 LFO,
3 osscillators
5 effects
After one year with it I am still amazed with this device.
Speaking about menu menu diving, there are a lot of controls on the panel but it still requires to access menu for more advanced stuff. But this is not a problem on Quantum because it has a very large touch display which makes the navigation very fast and non-frustrating.
If you can find a place to test it then try it, I bet you won’t be disappointed 
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I think the Hydrasynth desktop would be pretty much exactly what you’re looking for
Sound design galore, brilliant UI, and can be had used for like 600 bucks
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As a new owner of a Prophet Rev-2, I highly recommend it for doing deep synthesis. It’s such a joy to program, setting up modulation in the matrix is the fastest I’ve ever experienced. Super deep with lots of ways of modulating a patch… my favorite is to use audio out as a source and apply it to whatever.
Surprisingly I’ve found that stacking sounds with the secondary patch is incredibly fun. I thought I would use the multitimbral function more, but stacking patches and sending them to different effects is so much fun! It’s. It’s a knob per function synth at its finest imo!
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If money were no issue, I’d start with Waldorf Iridium, or a Modal Carbon8.
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Gotharman Zaturn
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Norand Mono.
You get an independent envelope and LFO for every single parameter. The LFO can go to audio rate. Through zero FM is on board as well. The sequencer is great.
That’s a lot of fun, I’d say.
(I once recreated a pretty realistic dog’s barking with it, if that’s any testimony of the sound design capacity)
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Were you able to determine who let the dogs out?
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I agree with you that the sequencing is hard to get your head around at first. An Elektron take on the Wavestate or Modwave would be absolutely amazing, and if you set it up right you can achieve some of that with Digitakt or Octatrack.
Korg’s way of doing things is a little less intuitive, but once you get it, extremely powerful. It’s “sequencer” is actually made up of “lanes” that denote gate, sample, timing, pitch, and a few others. You can get super crazy evolving patterns out of this. Not for the fai t of heart, but an absolute sound design beast if you ha e the stomach for it.
You can also choose not to dive that deep into wave sequencing and just use single sample presets and the machine will act as a regular bread and butter synth, but with thousands of oscillator types.
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Not sure if it was already mentioned, but the new smaller Groove Synthesis desktop appears to be a perfect little desktop sound design dream of a synth. I’ve had the bigger one myself, and either is probably as good as it gets for this purpose. They can do just about anything imaginable while sounding absolutely incredible. Picking up the little guy as soon as I can myself.
Future Sound Systems: Cric Desktop Synth 
Edit: Only paraphonic though…