chaosroyale wrote: ↑29 Dec 2019
But REs and VSTs are not equivalent.
VSTs are lighter on CPU (hard to believe, but true), have the possibility of more features than REs, can have bigger/nicer/more complex UI, and they usually get more after care and updates whereas REs often get abandoned by their developers. And you can actually sell a VST to someone.
I mean, again, you're sort of shifting the goalposts here - the question
assumes an equivalence between two devices, and you're coming in to say "well it can't be so because the classes themselves are not equivalent". So if one was more CPU-efficient than the other, they wouldn't be actually equivalent and the question would be moot. If the UI was a significant advantage (and "nicer" is in the eye of the beholder, I've seen plenty of UIs that sacrifice functionality over design or hide a lack of clarity and efficiency over multiple pages), then you'd get whichever one was better.
As for care and updates, I guess I'm not as impressed with a VST that may stop working and need to be updated as operating systems get updated, over REs where, even if they're abandoned and don't get updated or bugfixed, at least will work exactly that well as long as Reason is still around. In other words, they won't regress. Some larger VST-oriented companies may be around for a long while, but that's no guarantee they won't stop updating a product if they make a newer, fancier plug-in. And if they go out of business entirely and I dunno, the next Mac update borks your plug-in, well, you're just totally screwed.
Anyone who's ever read my past posts knows I'm unconcerned with the ability to resell plugins, so that's not an issue for me, at least. And so all other things being equal, which was kind of the point, I'd choose an RE over VST.
The whole reason I fell into using Reason way back when was that I pretty quickly could grok the way everything worked, while I remember staring at a copy of Ableton at about the same time and not being able to figure out how to get an instrument to do what I wanted. I like the way the Rack is organized, the CV is great, and yes, I can see multiple devices at once and adjust settings and connections between them without having to swap between windows or pages. So while I'm not a purist in this regard (I do have VSTs that I use), I still prefer REs - when available.