I really think that arrangers are by far the easiest way to START making music, but SMF's are the way to polish it off. Until that repetitive thing is dealt with, I always feel I am playing with a machine, but as soon as you go into the derived file, and start to mess things up a bit, suddenly it starts to sound like music that people played, not a machine...

People are FAR more aware of mechanicalness of music than you give them credit for. No matter how untrained, most people's ears can distinguish when a section of music is just a cut and paste repeat, and not an actual 'replaying' it a second time. Once you edit the arranger's output so you get this impression, things start to feel a LOT more like playing in a real band... Whether for original music OR for cover tunes.

Arrangers give the jumping off point, but they aren't the finishing line