Opinions vary, they always do. Some like it, some refuseniks don’t. Same old same old.
But I think some of this is beyond opinion. Some of the specific decisions make it impossible to use for the visually impaired, and this part in my opinion - worse for everyone.
Here’s an instructive A/B between C12 (left) and C13, with a midi channel highlighted.
On the left, the highlighted track is unmistakeable in C12. The track is input monitored, clearly visible with a yellow highlight. Although initially obscure to a new user, the tiny keyboard icon next to the number 2 at the bottom is of course the way you open the VST UI. It is at least the only lonely icon in sight in that whole area, and once you know you know, and it turns yellow once activated, making it clear that your window is open somewhere.
Now look at the right, the all new-and-improved C13. This is genuinely the default highlight tint - almost indistinguishable from the un-highlighted track. You can make it brighter in settings all the way to the old peak white if you like, but then you have a new problem - it obliterates the white text. The simple pre-C13 solution to simply make it white and invert the colour of the font from white to black. Perfect - and now seemingly permanently jettisoned.
There’s a lot more stuff as well. A new permanently greyed out box called “Insert Recording” that does God knows what. A new dropdown under All Midi Inputs that filters that input by channel (not the output channel). Pointless. And it all takes up vastly more space. Irrelevant clutter.
As for opening the instrument, that is now lost amid the 50 Shades Of Grey. It is cunningly hidden above another grey icon, the E one that opens the channel settings pane and deselects the channel as it does so. Thanks for that. When you do find it, it stays greyscale white, barely standing out amid all the grey goo.
There is the new nice feature where a small graphic of the VST is shown, which would provide a solution to the visibility problem - except that doesn’t work on midi tracks at all which are connected to an instrument. Only the instrument track itself has the image. Also for whatever reason there are half of my instruments in Windows where the snapshot to create the icon simply doesn’t work (it does on the Mac).
This, I’m afraid to say, is a mess. A UX disaster zone.
There’s a lot of issues to make things as bad as they are, and I understand that they might not all be able to be addressed. Here’s the priority imo:
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Highligher. Revert to peak white, black text. Anything else gives us little chance, and the visually impaired no chance at all. This is the one that is, imo, essential as it has a disability accessibility issue attached.
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Colour and layout. Revert to a yellow input indicator. Stop blocks of near-identical options in flat shades of grey.
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Add small VST images to MIDI tracks, not just instrument tracks.
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Give us the option to eliminate cluttered new redundant “features” like “insert recording”.