The manufacturers are floundering when it comes to finding new customers because they are basically ignoring the needs of younger players. You can only look forward to diminishing returns when you pin your future to an elderly and aging demographic. If you can't sell arrangers to kids, it's game over. Look at the 'home organ'...

Unless the big 3 make a concerted effort to make something like the old Yamaha DJX, but updated and improved to contemporary arranger abilities, the 'arranger' will turn into a rare, expensive niche keyboard, or a cheap nasty toy, or both!

Young players want something that can make THEIR music... and the arranger ain't it! Where are the arpeggiators? Where are the loopers? Where is the easy import of audio loops? Where are all the knobs for the synth sounds? You can't find them on modern (hah!) arrangers!

OTOH, the WS is gradually adding arranger like functions... chord following, buttons to change to different sections of a song, styles (of a sort), things like that. But it seems like they are doing it in a vacuum, that each new 'arranger-like' feature was invented from scratch, and nobody in the WS division is looking at a TOTL arranger and going 'that's a handy thing to do'. So they don't QUITE work right...

It's time for one of the big 3 to step up and go 'what's the easiest way to make modern music?'. The answer is a hybrid of arranger and WS. But each manufacturer out there seems utterly bent on balkanizing both these keyboards. Shared functionality is almost non-existent. But the bottom line is, if you want to sell a LOT of keyboards, you have to make modern music-making easy... the arranger is 'easy', the WS is 'modern'.

Somebody needs to combine the two.