Mike,

I too used to beleive in "the more the merrier" mantra, until I got my Roland G1000. I do like its sounds and styles a lot; however, it illustrates the downside of having too many sounds. I have a collection of over 1000 styles on my working Zip disk (and more archived on a CD). The instrument has over 1600 sounds, including the VA sounds from the E- series.

The problem is that they are organized extremely counter-intuitively, and are quite difficult to navigate to, especially in realtime performance setting. The sound set is broken up into 16 banks, each containing 8 individual selection. Then you can use variation up/down buttons to select the tone different from the one to which the selection defaults. Some selections have 5-6 variations, while others have several pages (more than 16). The problem I have with it is that although you would expect to select different variations to get different sounds, some tones which are lumped amongs variations have nothing to do with primary selections. For example, the Clarinet selection includes a Fretless (bass) tone among its variation. What do the two have in common? I believe Roland wanted to spread out the tones more evenly among the variation, but the results are extremely poor - press the variation button once too many times (not a difficult thing to do with the small screen and stage/day lighting), and you end up soloing on the bass instead of clarinet. The example I gave is not an exception.
Similar problem with styles (and midi files on disk) - you can select the ones you want, and there are sort facilities, but being able to see only three lines in the scroll window makes it hard to select live.

The moral: plenty of sounds/styles are OK, as long as you can select the one you want with one (or at most two) button pushes, and you don't have to search for things on screen.

Considering the limited number of buttons on the keyboard, there has to be a practical limit to how many sounds/styles the user can select from in a live setting.

In fact, the G1000 is quite good for playing live - it has performance memories which I use to select tones and other settings. It also has a set of Disk Link buttons, which allow you to create a "short list" of 111 styles, which are instantly playable from the disk, with two-three pushes of the button. You do have to watch on screen what is going on as you are pressing buttons, but if you have done the setup ahead of time (tedious, considering the above shortcomings), this is not too bad.

Regards,
Alex