Mostly, deficiencies become apparent when you actually USE something, I’m pretty sure that so much of an arranger is ignored by home users, perhaps that is why so much gets excused..?!

Thing is, make something WORK, everybody uses it. To be honest, I haven’t heard all that many wax lyrically about Yammie’s chord sequencer. And I got a feeling it’s for possibly the above reason. It’s just not as practical when it’s quite a PITA to locate the appropriate segment.

And if Roland had made a one button Performance call load up the style or SMF/MP3, the loops, the chord sequencer AND the sheet music, I am quite convinced that would have been lauded as a game changing feature. And sales would have gone through the roof.

Let a musician have the final say in design decisions, you end up with a product that musicians want to play. Let a software engineer or an accountant have it, you end up with a product not even they want to play.

People don’t use arranger features if they are badly designed.

BTW, coming from a live band background, I found that on the whole, if you just bumped up the drums about 10 in the BK-9’s mixer and turned off the style compressor, most of the styles weren’t too badly mixed. That mastering compressor was quite a bit too aggressive for me, especially if you had a pro PA or good home studio monitors. Basically, the settings on it were optimized to play though crappy small computer speakers like so many do (and the settings were a hangover from the crap built-in speakers in the BK5/3).

But you’re right, it’s a damn good B3 sim for an arranger. I have sat in with live bands just playing its organ, and many have commented about ‘What kind of Nord is that?!’ 🎹😂