Huh, what have you been smoking? I've never done anything diplomatic in my entire life, and to heck with anyone that says I have.

As for arranger keyboards, I have mixed feeling about them (sorta like Russ).

PRO's:
They're a lot of fun and they even sometimes inspire ideas for writing or arranging.

They're great for studying parts (like drums, bass, or brass) that you might not otherwise be familiar with.

They make nice simple-to-use drum machines, although a tad expensive.

CON's:

They never play a song the way I want it played.

I (and this is just me) just don't view them as legitimate musical instruments WHEN USED IN ARRANGER (STYLE) MODE, no matter what technique you use; full keyboard mode, etc.

They force you to play in an unnatural way to accommodate chord recognition and completely 'blows' your left hand technique.

They draw ridicule from the other 98% of musicians who DON'T use them. Whether this is justified or not is arguable.

Except for OMBs, almost no one uses them on normal gigs (although some of the features would make them quite easy to use in a band setting).

There is a stigma that says, 'you can't play' or 'if you can, you don't play that well'.

Everything arranger-based sounds dated (to me). Although the capability to tweak or individualize styles is there, very few actually do it, making arranger performances VERY identifiable and leaving only vocals (or sidemen, frontmen) to differentiate one arranger performance from another.

Other than that, I like the little buggers. If I had to rate all my current keyboards (plugged in and active) in terms of pleasure/fun/inspiration, etc., it would be something like this:

Nord C1-------------95% (would be 100% if there were no B3's in the world)

Roland VP550--------70% (soon to be replaced by VP770)

Triton Classic------75% (still love it)

Korg PA1X Pro-------50% (haven't seen a need to upgrade, yet)

Fantom G7-----------45% (just wrong board for my needs)

Yamaha Motif ES-----35% (don't use arps, etc., just voices).

Roland A70----------30% (used with SonicCell and softsynths).

Tyros 2-------------15% (don't like the styles, love the guitars which I use to record).

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I think the guys that do the factory style creations are absolute geniuses, but in the end, it's their music, not ours. JMO.

chas