When I say that arrangers suck, and don't come close to a real band, I am afraid I am referring to thei PLAYING, not the styles they play, or even their sounds, to a large degree.

Completely idiomatic playing on even a pretty naff sound still sounds great, and can fool many people. But an amazing sound, played by a robot, still sounds horrible, IMO. And arrangers still have a VERY long way to go before they play voicings, and, more especially, the changes BETWEEN voicings anything NEAR what real players do.

It drives me crazy to listen to ANY of them, good, bad and ugly, when they start block voicing chord changes, jumping lines around, and completely ignoring voice leading. Then the same six or fewer fills trying to make sixteen possible transitions (only three in Korg's case, often just TWO )...

It's not about whether the style is programmed well in the first place... The best of them still have a complete inability to join together chords and musical passages the way that real players do, most of them sound IDENTICAL whether you are playing your RH hard or soft (or only make the barest change of volume or velocity).

But, rather than talk about things like this, we disappear up our own backsides arguing SOUND, while the manufacturers ignore some pretty obvious things they could do to make these MUSICAL things happen.

Me, I'd rather have sixteen fills per style (what you need for every possible Var to Var combination) than any NUMBER of SA sounds. I'd rather have a style engine that could have a bassline play in root, but look at the chord inversion you are actually PLAYING to guide its' decisions about what inversion to play SOME of the arranger Parts in than any number of mp3 playback features, or karaoke center cancel audio bullsh*t...

I'd rather see a half dozen REALLY detailed drumkits, with a dozen or more velocity cross-switches than thirty drum kits with virtually NO vel X-switches. I'd like to see drum sections that got more or less complex with the 'inside' stuff depending on how fast YOU are playing. I'd like to see simple, easy to use controls for easily dropping a full arrangement down to just bass and drums, then small combo, then full ensemble...

And you know what? SOME of these features USED to be on some older arrangers. But they got dropped, because so much emphasis is placed on features for the One Finger crowd and karaoke wannabes, stuff that is subtle, that only a discerning ear can hear gets lost in the noise...

It's sad. The arranger has a LOT more potential than is currently being shown. But few of us seem to be even SLIGHTLY interested in making it more realistic by behavioral OS improvements, preferring realistic SOUNDS being played unrealistically.