I’ve been digging more into videos and comments on the J-6 Chord, and it looks better than I initially thought. The most obvious reason is that you can plug in a MIDI keyboard and use it like a 4-voice synth module. You can also play the buttons on the button like a keyboard - wouldn’t be preferred, but a nice, portable option.
But there is actually a bit more control of the synth engine than appears. It isn’t full ADSR control like you’d have on an analog synth, but that’s kind of the genius of it. But those concepts are also very intimidating for beginner synth players (they were for me). The J-6 can take care of a lack of sound design knowledge by giving you some control over filter and envelope without breaking that down into 4-8 different knobs. Same with a lack of music theory - you can play in different genres and pre-programmed scales.
https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxh4eQxDQZSj7ZSzADv-lE60I-NlzhEUcM
You can see on the Anderton’s video around 6:45 where he starts playing the chord stabs (manually) and it really clicked for me how useful this could potentially be.
One slightly bummer is that it doesn’t look like there’s any deeper control over parameters via MIDI (as was the case on some Volcas). Allowing you to hook up like an Arturia Keylab and have like a full functioning sound module with CC’s for a bunch of parameters would have been pretty huge.