Hi Nigel

I must say that of course these are my tastes but to be honest, I love the Kronos but for what it's worth to you, here are my issues:-
It seems to be a lot about "tweaking" - and boy can you tweak - so so many parameters.
There doesn't seem to be any consistency regarding the control surface (sliders/buttons etc) in that you can really get used to a nice PROGRAM/COMBI and then switch to another to find that the control surface operates completely differently - this annoyed me even with the CX3 presets. So I repeat that the Ksounds CX3 configurations are not only great but their control surface settings are rock solid consistent.
It really isn't friendly - from a performance perspective then Nord Stage would leave it for dead, but it has AWESOME sounds - KARMA is so very inspirational - fabulous composer/song writer machine.

Seriously Nigel, I do love Korg gear (been many years now - mostly arrangers plus the KARMA, M3 and now Kornos) and am an administrator (like yourself) on the Korg forums.

I hope you can get your hands on one for some solid research.
As all this is under the Roland VR09 topic I can seriously say that the VR09's tonewheel & rotary is pretty damned great (and the low cost!!!) I am using it currently mainly as a "B3" sound module with my Korg PA3X-76.

I am far from a Kronos expert but I would be more than happy to answer any other questions you may have. It is an outstanding workstation.

Cheers

Pete