James,

The Mediastation was a viable product as a workstation and arranger, it's downfall was in the execution. You can't market it as an arranger if you don't supply enough styles and sounds to make most people happy. The average arranger person doesn't do much in the line of programming which is why Yamaha is so successful. They ship their products with enough styles and soumds to keep the average user happy. Dom thought the open architecture would be enough to offer the arranger and workstation user OOTB then they could expand upon the platform themselves. The error in that thinking was that all but a few delve deeply into their arranger or workstation. That left a small percentage of people like yourself and I who would and could use it to our advantage.

Wersi learned long ago that in order to sell a $5k+ instrument to a demographic consisting of mostly the geriatric who aren't technically savvy, they needed an interface that would be so seemless anyone could operate the instrument. The Mediastation had a broad learning curve and many of the features weren't finished by the time Dom released it. In fact it took several years before they came to fruition. By that time the Mediastation's user interface still wasn't intuitive enough to make it easy for the masses. Dom certainly could have rectified the issues with additional updates and a sound/style library, but that would have added to the cost of the instrument. With sales low, rather than pump additiinal money into the Mediastation, he pulled the plug.

By the time the Groove concept was about to go full scale, the bad press on the forums had all but killed the sales. I'm surprised Dom stuck it out as long as he did. He really did believe in the product and rightfully so. In 5 years time, I'm certain open architecture instruments will be widely available from the big three.