I’d like to offer an opinion in response to the question on how easy it is to get a good result - In my opinion, you need to invest quite a bit of time reading the manuals, watching the tutorials and lurking in the forums in order to get familiar with all of the articulations and ways of setting up VI or better VIPro. There are many products that offer lush pad sounding strings right out of the box for $400<$1000-ish. If that’s all you need, you might want to stop there.
What you find with VSL however, is that you probably know less about orchestrating than you need to, which leads to spending more money on orchestration books/courses . Also VI and VIPro are very feature rich, therefore, you tweak one thing wrong, and you may spend a bit of time figuring out why your lush strings are suddenly so harsh sounding. Personally, I enjoy the geek part of it - except when I’m inspired and want fast results…
I started with VSL back in January. Several months and several thousand Euros later, I have the complete Standard Edition Vols 1-4, some extra solo instruments (bought on sale!), and VIPro, VEPro and Vienna Suite.
To the point of some of our friendly forumites this stuff ain’t cheap. Beyond the cost of the software, I also added a second mac to host VSL, invested in SSDs and maxed out the RAM in both machines.
So, it’s not cheap. It becomes addictive and time consuming to learn. It’s not as easy as loading up Symphobia/Addagio Strings/Cinematic Strings/etc. in Kontact… but Holy Mother of God - when you set it up right, what a heavenly racket you can make with this stuff! Suddenly, a point-n-shoot string library will appear very limited through its lack of articulations or parameter control.
Another note - VSL sounds DRY. Intentionally. That’s so you can use a good reverb to put instruments in their place. You really have to try out VSL’s reverbs too. Cubase’s REVerence is ok, but Vienna Suite is awesome. (I’ll try MIR pro when I get a third Mac).
And by the way, VEPro has been bulletproof with Cubase 6.5 for me and has really helped to unload my main MacPro DAW. I even run Kontakt and Omnisphere on the second machine sometimes.