Elektron, please stay focused on making awesome stand-alone deep hardware. Bring back the days of the Machinedrum. Physical individual outs will always be better than a USB substitute. If you need to keep the size and manufacturing costs down, how about 8-channel optical ADAT? Resist the urge to virtualise everything!
Yes, you can do a lot with the DAW and fancy graphics on a big screen but that’s not why we buy the hardware.
If we wanted to use plug-ins to make music, we’d use the vast amounts of quality plugs already available, and which sonically destroy every single piece of Elektron gear - IMO.
We’re in a situation now that newer Elektron gear is more unstable than the silver boxes, and the culprit seems to be Overbridge.
Maybe I’m wrong but I’m not a newbie and I know why I invested in Elektron gear. It’s for the hardware and the sequencer. I have 16 analogue inputs to feed into my computer with a couple of decent quality and affordable Firewire audio interfaces. Why would I want to go through USB?