I just wanted to mention to all you readers out there, that here in the USA there is no more i30 korg keyboard. The Korg US company discontinued these several months ago. So here in the US we can only hope that some of the oriental capabilities will still remain in the PA80 which is due to be released late in October.
I would also like to remind everyone that roland does put all their oriental percussion sounds in almost every high end arranger keyboard. The G1000, EM2000, VA5 and VA7 all have the E500 oriental percussion sounds, and there are also over a dozen oriental instrument sounds in each of these keyboards. The styles are what are missing, and although the zip disk supplied with these keyboards have a few middle eastern styles, there are not enough. However, I have recieved styles on floppys, programmed by musicians around the world to offer really good arabic, armenian and other country's styles to play in these keyboards.
I would like to point out that even Generalmusic is starting to go away from using arabic kit floppy disks. In the WK2 products you either buy the oriental keyboard version or the non-oriental keyboard version. there is no oriental kit upgrade available to turn the wk2 into a wk2oriental. This was also true with the PK5 and the PK5Oriental. I think you might not see the disks being used to much longer.
The reason is clear to me. Many musicians share there software and the manufactures can't make any mony when customers let their friends make copies. I have been hearing this from Company's for a long time.Also, when buying dedicated middle eastern keyboards, you get extra features such as quartertone tuning buttons rather than having to use scale converters or deep editing situations.
i understand what you are saying about making things more consistant for the users, but there is another side for the makers of keyboards to. Keyboard manufactures will only keep making new and better keyboards as long as there are buyers, and so the market has to be driven by the need for new products all the time. If everything could be updated, we would see a freeze in quality new products. this is just my assessment of what I see in the industry. I could be completely wrong, but I've been in my store over 30 years now and I've seen alot and heard alot!
George Kaye