Monotone is not even half the synth that Subtractor is. Monotone is banished to the corner of shame alongside Rytmik. Horrible low-effort thing. I hate it so much (I need to chill out).
Europa is a completely different kind of synth, and cannot do a lot of what Subtractor can do. They are very different beasts altogether. Europa is probably the best built-in modern-style wavetable synth in a DAW, I sometimes don't give them credit for that because I don't personally like those kinds of synths, but for lots of users I am sure it's very welcome.
Your Massive > Massive X analogy: fair enough, I'd be happy with a "Subtractor X". And of course the NN-NeXT. And Kong..kong...konger? Kongest? Konger eel? Can't think of a good name there.. All 3 of those are *almost* great, but stuck in the past. And nothing else in Reason fills those gaps properly. Grain should ideally have been one of the engines in a new main sampler. Maybe that will come, who knows.
jlgrimes wrote: ↑20 Sep 2020
I think at this point though, its probably best to leave it alone. Props have made Europa and Monotone which somewhat builds off of Subtactor and are more flexible and generally better sounding.
Kind of like NI keeping Massive and creating Massive X. Massive still has uses. But Massive X generally does more.
I think at this point if they improved it too much, it would be a different instrument. It is amazing that a 20 year old softsynth is still being used. At this point folks probably will use Subtractor to get the sound of older softsynths.