Get a used OT mk1, going around 750€/620GBP atm.
Midi wise no difference, only little ui upgrades but no need to spend 1100GBP on a new mkII.
The build quality is superior. And the sampling possibillities totally seal the deal. Try one, sell it if it does not fit.
This is good advice I think. A second hand one should hold its value long enough to work out if its for you or not. Then sell it and get a mkii or polyend depending how you go.
I’d get the mk2, I have one and it’s ok to learn if you put the time in, the dedicated buttons for certain functions seem to make enough of a difference. As for midi i use it to sequence by setting a lot of conditional trigs and different individual track lengths, multipliers etc. I then let it run and tweak the sound on the machines. I like that way of composing. But I’m also drawn to the seq as the visual clarity of what is on each track is appealing. It comes down to the music you make and the best way to do that. OT requires setup time and then you let it do it’s thing while knob fiddling.
Recently I read a forum thread[1] about Vince Clarke which mentioned that he did much of his compositions on a custom sequencer that consisted of six Arp 1601 sequencer clones. I realized the Octatrack MIDI implementation is more like this than a piano-roll DAW. It’s a bunch of old-skool knob sequencers in a box with LFOs and arpeggiators, a different set for each pattern.