All in all, I’ve grown very impressed with Cubases stock VST(i) plugins, love Padshop (for the most part… see… Padshop 3 Feature Requests - Virtual instruments / Padshop - Steinberg Forums), but I don’t reach for Retrologue all that often.
There was never really a replacement for Mystic/Prologue/Spector, which imo leaves a hole in market/genre reach objectives - especially against Steinbergs probably main competitor - Logic.
Logic has, the formerly Camel Audio, Alchemy:
Perhaps the reason for this is to try and funnel users towards Halion, but I don’t think that’s realistic for the vast majority of market reach. It’s a vast program that requires learning all sorts of UI navigation and protocols.
Obviously the return of Mystic/Prologue/Spector, with updated UI and additional features - would make a lot of long-time users happy… But if that’s not possible,
It would be great to get some new capable workhorse digital synths with simple/efficient UIs that match Cubendos current UI Style (instead of overly stylized UIs like Retrologue/Padshop) in the vein of:
-Dmitry Sches: Diversion, Thorn (I’m a big user of Diversion)
-Waldorf: Attack 3/Blofeld/Microwave
-Xfer Serum
-Logic Alchemy
-Uhe Hive 2/Zebra 3
-rhizomatic: Synestia, Plasmonic (developer of Absynth)
-NI: Absynth
It’s interesting that Steinberg/Yamaha haven’t just hard-acquired 3rd party synth companies and their product lines like Apple/Logic did with Alchemy.
I think Retrologue is a fine synth, but it comes across on the surface as if it’s just a no-frills synth built with Halion with a classic UI… A little too classic. It looks like it is older than it is… Like it’s a vintage-digital-vintage synth… I guess it has been 11 years. Same with PadShop for that matter.
All in all, I’m pretty content with what I have both 3rd party wise and what Steinberg offers. I get cool stuff out of PadShop and occasionally Retrologue, but there isn’t really a reason to reach for it over my 3rd party stuff.
It just seems like a hole in factory content marketing, imo.
edit
Also, there’s a huge opportunity with MIDI 2.0, polyphonic expression/MPE… That not only have most 3rd party developers not capitalized on, but certainly DAW developers haven’t in their stock instruments. This could be a good competitive angle of attack.