Personally, I don’t think we owe any ‘respect’ to the arranger industry, any more than we owe respect to the refrigerator companies, or truck manufacturers, or the makers of ANY consumer product. They are only as good as their last product, and when you see industry wide flaws in new products (anybody here want to tell me that the refrigerator they just bought will last as long as their previous fridge?) you shouldn’t get your hackles up if some of these flaws are pointed out.

We’ve had a decade or so of TOTL arrangers being sold (at rapidly increasing prices) with quite considerable software issues that can take a year or more to be addressed. I don’t think it’s inappropriate to remind everyone about this during the anticipation for a product being ‘teased’ in completely unrevealing trailers. Even the Genos had to be updated in a major software revision, and Yamaha were of old pretty reliable at launching ‘finished’ products.

So if you’re upset that I'm not paying Yamaha enough ‘respect’, I think you are too invested in one brand, and might benefit from backing out a bit and looking at the big picture. Things have taken a downturn in reliability recently. That, in my book, is no cause for ‘respect’.

As I always say, an arranger is a TOOL for making music, like a trowel is a tool for gardening. If there’s something wrong with how trowels are getting made these days, do you think you owe ‘respect’ to the trowel industry? Or to a fridge? It’s a consumer product, and what it deserves is scrutiny and a degree of skepticism, not blind allegiance and ‘respect’…