I pretty much agree with you AJ. It's interesting about the Sweet! and Live! voices missing from the Motif ES... I think some of those sounds from my 9000 Pro, like the alto sax, are better than than their counterparts on my Motif ES. OTOH the Oboe and Violins/Cellos sounds on the Mo ES are the best I've ever heard. There are sounds on the Motif ES without any counterpart on any other synth made, such as one my favs "Criminal" which is an incredible MegaVoice acoustic guitar with a guitar-strum arp layered over a synth-vocal patch which modulates from "aaah" to "oooh". Instant Enya!

I've ordered my PLG150-PF piano expansion card for my Mo ES because I am one of those that dislikes the new triple-strike acoustic piano on the Mo ES (I find I'm not alone on that). Another interesting feature missing is the Mo has no XG presets (!). There is a dedicated GM button but no XG... really strange for Yamaha to do that after so many years of pushing XG over GM but I guess they had to bow to GM's dominance. I now have a library of XG midi files and programs for editing XG plus I often edit my songs for XG for live use, so now I've ordered the PLG100-XG expansion card also for the Mo ES (didn't want to have to do that but no choice really). I'm also going to install my PLG150-DR card in the MO becase it still has the best drum samples IMHO. That'll use all of the Mo expansion ports and when everything is installed I'll have a total Mo ES polyphony of 256 notes.