A little something from Wikipedia to get you started in your investigations:
The three founders were Daniel Hansson, Anders Gärder and Mikael Räim.
Edit: snap @plragde 
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It seems Anders left in 2017-18 to join TE:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anders-gärder-034a8858?originalSubdomain=se
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There’s a point to what you’re saying, but users aren’t actually really “like-minded people” from the point of view of the designers. Other designers are the like-minded people to them. Being someone who is passionate about making instruments is different from being someone who is passionate about using them to make music. There are overlaps, for sure, but fewer than you might think.
If I was a designer, I would appreciate the people who use my products, but I’d also be aware that they’re not experts in my field, and don’t realize the limitations and realities that product designers are working with. Therefore, conversations with them would get frustrating and boring in the end.
Of course everyone is different, and some people have a very thick skin, but if I was a very succesful synth designer, I’d very quickly try to find someone else who would deal with user feedback, the constant wave of feature requests (many of them conflicting or impossible to realize), and both the adoration when people love my products, and the hurt feelings when customers are disappointed.
I’d have absolutely no desire to hear, for the thousandth time, that Overbridge is shit, and then deal with people thinking that I’m “full of myself” when I don’t want to address their questions about it, or to defend myself for the hundreth time about why we made a certain design decision. That kind of stuff can get to you, make you doubt yourself, drain you, even make you depressed, so it’s better not to get engaged. The gains you’d get from geeking out with thousands of anonymous synth nerds are very small – and you do meet your own small community of synth nerds at the office, every day, most of them more engaged in this topic than the average forum user.
This would actually mean that you’d need to have a professional customer service role on at all times when dealing with the public, and that is draining. That’s better left to the people who are more detached from the design of the product, and therefore don’t take comments personally, and who find customer service meaningful and rewarding.
It’s not quite the same thing, but to offer a point of comparison, few pop musicians spend their free time on discussion boards. They’re attached to their babies and seeing them slaughtered time after time isn’t easy, and conversely, adoration can inflate your ego to an unhealthy degree.
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All true, and this is why I am amazed to see designers, not just of Elektron equipment, show up here and engage. Not constantly, but enough to be impressive. It is a gift to us.
Are there any good interviews with the octatrack tech team about their ideas, experiments and implementation choices?
Like a lot of people I find the octatrack musically fascinating, but also, er… intellectually nourishing. It reminds me a little of the ancient boardgame Go: a small number of simple rules, as a starting point, can create a vast complex and unfathomable playground. I find myself thinking about it walking down the street and wanting to talk to people about it, how a design choice creates an unexpected workflow or happy accident.
I’d really like to read more of what the octatrack designers and engineers in elektron were thinking when they created it but I can’t find much.
Does anyone have any links to interviews or articles?
As a window into the kind of introspection I’m after, the text below is from the manual. It’s the closest I can find to this kind of content. And it’s excellent:
"The first relatively affordable samplers were released in the 1980’s and made a huge impact on the music scene of that time. Sonic elements, taken from completely new sources, could suddenly form a vital part of a composition. This resulted in the birth and evolution of several genres, for example hip hop. The concept of the sampler has since then branched off in several directions. Software based samplers are today capa- ble of handling enormously large, multi-sampled, sample libraries. Hardware samplers aren’t really suited for those tasks. Instead, they come to their best when conceived as dedicated devices focusing on new and radical approaches to sampling.
"When we developed the Machinedrum UW, one of the goals was to allow for a creative use of samples. Once the machine was released it became apparent that especially the RAM machines, which made it pos- sible to record sounds in real-time and instantly play them back, were utilized in ways we originally couldn’t even imagine. Users around the world used them to incorporate live sampled shortwave radio sounds in their compositions, make instant remixes of 12” records and to more or less conceive new genres of music. It was obvious that the RAM machine concept harbored a tremendous potential. This was the starting point of the Octatrack. We wanted to create a machine that would regard recorded material not as inflexible sounds, but rather as something highly malleable. This is one of the reasons why the Octatrack exists. The other one is because of the stage. The laptop computer has quickly established itself as a common instru- ment in live setups. It is a powerful and highly customizable tool, however, the multi functionality is at the same time a disadvantage. When it comes to audio related tasks a laptop is still a jack of all trades but mas- ter of none. The Octatrack on the other hand is designed to be a streamlined, reliable and straightforward machine allowing live performers to really add something extra to their sets. It can act as a backing track machine, a second turntable, a source of experimental soundscapes or simply as an instrument encourag- ing improvisation and fun.
“These two reasons converge and form the ultimate raison d’être of the Octatrack: its capability to re-estab- lish sampling as an art form. We hope it will be a trusty companion during your musical endeavours.”
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I was going to cross-reference another thread I saw recently based on that quote … but it appears that quote is everywhere.
couldn’t sleep last night and ended up down the rabbit hole of wondering why/how the OT came into being. great thread 
They mey have been over-egging the pudding a bit on this, considering the MPC-5000 (for all its issues) was hardly two years old when it was written.
mpc sampling workflow is totally removed from the OT approach, imo.
too few eggs, if anything
I’ve been doing some research into musique concrète history amongst other things and I feel like the OT is perhaps best understood as a modern interpretation of a Phonogène/Morphophone style device -
I don’t know if the designers of the OT actually had these in mind necessarily, but it’s utility for this kind of compositional style and way of thinking is clear to me. The speed and fluidity with which you can sample and resample while also using the FX to manipulate the audio combined with that powerful sequencer is what makes it stand out from other devices and DAWs.
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