just having a physical upper and lower limit makes a difference to me. Listening with my ears and trying to increase the attack on a compressor or something, it’s nice to feel when I’ve reached the limit. I posted earlier that I’m using this controller a lot for an EQ - I feel like I’m pretty regularly wanting to decrease gain on a band further than I actually am capable of… of course just looking at a screen and seeing the value at 0 should accomplish pretty much the same thing at a much lower cost, but price not considered having limits /is/ better. The haptic feedback though does take it over the edge of being a small quality of life increase to a pretty big one. I had a mastering course years ago where the professor had a fancy expensive EQ with detented knobs, everybody in the class was dorking out about how good it felt to click that shit lol. It’s absolutely not necessary, but it is just very nice and comfortable to work with.
Honestly the form factor was a selling point for me too. I don’t always use my computer desk for audio stuff but I do want some equipment to be readily setup for use. Having a clunky faderport8 as a centerpiece of my desk is not something I want. Something like an ableton Push is also just very large and takes up a ton of usable space (not to mention I straight up never use the session view so the pads are not useful to me). The roto sits very nicely behind my keyboard and functions as both a channel mixer and plugin controller. Lots of functionality for a small amount of desk space sacrificed.
Also yes, I am very interested in alternative keycaps. I’m more interested in how Melbourne instructs people to change the caps rather than the actual caps they sell. I am a little bit of a mech keyboard dork, so out of curiosity I put a cap puller on one of the keys and pulled with a slight amount of effort, but they seemed either soldered or adhesed on in some kind of way… I’m not sure about that but I didn’t want to break it. More than I want the orange keycaps I want to get something that matches my keyboard, unless of course whatever keycaps get sold are proprietary somehow.