right - I know I can use all those other synths - in fact, I might even have a pirated copy of battery somewhere, but, being a software engineer professionally, I don't steal software, so reason's all I've really got to work with and I was assuming that right out of the box it would do all these great things, but it seems it's only really for techno/house music (forgive my illiteracy in the department of accurately naming electronic music genres)

I use Nuendo, so running VSTs is no issue - Reason is actually a nice setup, it is a stand-alone app ( I don't think it runs as a plugin, if it does that's kinda cool, but I don't know how) - instead, you launch it after your sequencer starts and it connects via Rewire (which, if you're not hip to, basically means you have a connection from each of the reason "hardware" outputs directly into your DAW mixer) I like the combination of these two packages just fine (although nuendo is certainly overkill for what I do, I can't tolerate the UIs of "lesser programs" like cubase or anything cakewalk - they look like poorly written toys - ew) - I just wish that reason made those little "booo...booo...booo..booo" noises and maybe 1 or 2 other things.... I heard so many of the sounds that it makes that it seemed to me that it should have at least 1 patch that does what I'm looking for (knowing full well that I would not use the majority of patches and presets other than the pianos, strings and bloopies) - perhaps I just need to spend more time tweaking the synths, but I can't even find anything that is even remotely close as a starting point in any of the presets... it's kind of a drag......
-w