Awful lot of opinion dressed up as FACT (especially FransN) but hey! That's SZ in a nutshell...

I think my take is that Roland saw the writing on the wall sooner than most. The market for arrangers is slowly dying out (there sure isn't a whole new generation playing them) and there's only room at the top for one to make a decent profit. So they bailed on the TOTL and MOTL segment, left it to Yamaha, and have concentrated on the low end. Each successive $1000 arranger has got better and better, and incorporated more from their old TOTL models, and in today's economy, that makes sense, IMO.

Maybe, if the economy turns round, and kids start playing arrangers in larger numbers, there's a hope they will return to TOTL production, but the market keeps shrinking, and Yamaha's share keeps growing. That's not a recipe for profits at the TOTL end. Unless you house them in a piano like shell, and charge a fortune..!

In the meantime, products like the BK-7m offer MUCH of Roland's TOTL technology (including the amazing Cover and Makeup Tools) at the @$1000 point, and that's a GOOD thing, isn't it?