A thought that has come about from reading back through this is that sometimes it IS actually the tools’ fault that they don’t work how you’d like, hence buying more stuff to try and find one closer to the ideal. I mean, though there’s a lot of options, the actual paradigms are quite limited in range. I have gone quite deep into speccing out what I think would be my preferred way of working, but got to the point where it means I have to make that tool myself. Part of the reason I ended up making less and less music was that I began learning exactly how one could do that by means of electrical engineering + programming which is another life’s worth of mastery in itself.
If anyone is wondering: the MPS Zyklus looks close to my ideal. Imagine that but modernised, and with built in audio recording capacity and you’re nearly there.
Even the great Vangelis had this problem, but also had nearly infinite money to throw at the solution. Wonder if he ever found one?