I am in no way an ‘official’ expert on Roland’s inner machinations! My opinions merely come from heavy involvement in the arranger products from the RA-90 onwards (and synths and WS’s before that) and just reading between the lines after that.

Roland have always frustrated me because of their ‘two steps forward, three steps back’ approach for decades. But this has always been a primarily arranger fault, their WS’s, synths and modules seemed a steady improvement. I’ve long felt the blame for this was Roland Japan rolling over the Italian team, or firing or moving around personnel in Italy before they’ve really polished the feature.

But careful recollection of the trauma each new generation of arrangers shows it a consistent fault. Yamaha tend to slowly inch forward with little retrograde issues, so did Korg until the whole PA2X>PA3X fiasco, and now even more with the 3x>4x disaster. Currently, Korg sit at the top of my list of arranger manufacturers likely to bow out of the Pro market shortly. They certainly seem to be running the Roland playbook!

I think anyone who has had similar long term involvement with playing Roland arrangers could come to roughly my conclusions (at least the Roland ones, debate’s still ongoing about Korg!). I’m hard pressed to understand the chaos without the clash of two mutually exclusive design priorities going on in secret… 🎹🩷