Opt for DDMF Metaplugin over Blue Cats. My experience between them is DDMF is way more stable, more versatile across platforms, and much better support.
Surely you are aware of impending drop of support for VST2.
It is simply not fair to only consider people that can afford to drop literally thousands to tens of thousands of dollars on plugins. The market is substantially huge, with a ton of sites heavily weighted towards only positive reviews, making it incredibly challenging for any users to clearly understand the differences between products from marketing or reviews alone, and often not in-depth enough trial options to truly understand the competitive value - not to mention the investment of time.
It takes a great deal of time and patience to find the right toolsets for your workflows, and often there simply being another developer producing a similar product in VST3 to a VST2 version you already is far from sufficient if it means you can’t do what you truly need.
Steinberg made both of these, and is clearly motivated to push VST3, despite the financial burden to developers and users alike when there simply isn’t a need. Steinberg only benefits from doing it.
While my personal and strong belief is that VST3 is the right direction to go and offers substantial benefits, it is completely unclear why this means they have to force everyone else to do so. It certainly feels … very ethically questionable.
Youre talking about saving hundreds but then comparing halionsonic SE to Kontakt komplete that costs £500+. They’re all pricier options bar pigments. If someone did have those, then you still need a DAW either way. I think that shows HALion is not entirely out of its league. & if you factor in the additional prices of the instruments you mentioned, then you’re not saving hundred by getting studioOne pro (£339.00) - cubase 12 pro costs £497.00 - I’ve done some amazing things with HALion sonic SE, the selection of sounds is limited though, but you can get it sounding just as good as any other synth. It works better as a complimentary Instrument imo though & its orchestra & voice instruments are its stand out go to’s for me. It really just depends how creative you are & if you know what to look for. Because it does contain a lot of sounds that I’d never look twice at. But the gems are great.
In terms of VSTi’s cubase doesn’t offer a lot at all. I agree. It’s disappointing considering steinberg created VSTS. But Retrolog is great like you said (I really only use it for bass). & I use Groove Agent SE a lot too but it’s just a sampler machine.
What sets cubase well apart from the other DAWS as a creative tool is how flexible it is at interweaving the recording, beat making, & engineering processes (including mastering). It’s a whole suite and you never have to leave the DAW. If you write scores and notations, there’s even tools for that. & video editing even. Cubase MIDI editing is next to none, and really the only thing i think it needs ASAP is individual note slides/glides. They could literally patch that in today. I also don’t think steinberg is aware that more and more people are doing production & engineering themselves. They need to put more attention towards VSTi, we want more individual unique VST instruments not add-ons & loops. This is one of the reasons why I might switch to something else
We have to be honest; there’s a reason why Cubase is at the top of “best of…” EOY lists each year, is mentioned first on most plugin website that recommend products/compatibility DAWS. Because it’s really that good. It’s so rich with tools that even though I’ve been using cubase since ~2007-9 I still discover things I didn’t know were possible. It’s an extremely powerful DAW. I’ve used Protools, Logic, Ableton live, acid pro, CakeWalk, FL Studio, REAPER, Reason, adobe audition & a few others.
if someone were to buy cakewalk and Kontakt complete to avoid using cubase pro and halionsonic sonic SE -which is included - the cost would be £949… unless they get pigments at which point price is about the same. Kontakt komplete with StudioOne costs £938. StudioOne + pigments costs ~£470.
I have a few questions for you if you don’t mind:
where are the hundreds of savings coming from that you mentioned?
What exactly do Cakewalk and StudioOne as DAWs do better than cubase?
What’s the 1.4% of things that you believe StudioOne doesn’t have?I’m considering switching to another program but because of the price of the adding and updates, it’s insane. I actually own no steinberg plugins, I can’t justify the pricing. Plus the bugs. Im REALLY not sure what the direction of cubase is right now &I get weird energy from it
Cakewalk is made by SONAR, and Bandlabs is a totally different product or did you mistype, or am I misunderstanding?
Pricing
Cubase pro 12
£497.00
Cakewalk
$499 (~ £410)
Studio one.
£399
HALion Sonic SE 3
£ FREE
HALion 6
£300
Kontakt komplete 14 Standard
£539
Kontakt komplete 14 ultimate
£1,079
Absolute 5 £429.00
Pigments ~£80
Falcon 2. ~£300
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Good to know, thanks. 
Another eventual option, once Cubase 13 will be release. Maybe I’ll just stay with 12, though. Still undecided : actually, it will depend if features improvements/true bug fixes will compensate for the lost VST 2.4 support and the need/hassle to bridge VSTis that are natively and perfectly working today, with 12.0.50…
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It runs on M1 Macs, it just isn’t being ported to ARM.
Cubase Pro is like $250. Get a Steinberg interface and then upgrade from AI.
So, basically $60 more than the up front cost of Logic Pro.
And frankly, who ever buys from the manufacturer’s website as a first course of action? I pretty much NEVER do this, because retailers are ALWAYS cheaper even when we aren’t in a promotional period, and often the savings stack on top of any promotion, so it’s just… always cheaper to get elsewhere.
Abusing discounts upgrades should be pretty normal for anyone in this industry. Coupon Clippers have been a thing for deacdes.
You buy your interface (that you’re going to need, anyways, especially if you’re on a PC) and then you upgrade to Pro for $259 and that’s that.
As for Native Instruments. They have cyclical sales are fairly pre-determined points of the year. If you think I paid $1,100 for Komplete Ultimate then I have a bridge to the moon to sell you. It was practically half of that.
Also, I compared Kompelte to Absolute, not Kontakt alone.
The Kontakt Factory Library 2 is still better than 90% of the stuff that comes with HALion 6, and will blow away the stock HALion content that comes with a DAW like Cubase Pro. The best thing Cubase bundles is Verve, and that’s a new v12 addition.
90% of the people I know got Pigments for $50 or less, because of the constant sales on that software. UVI also has 30-50% off sales.
Do you exercise any degree of planning with your purchases, ever?
I think you just exercise too much planning yourself.
You’ve overlooked a large portion of what I wrote & now youre talking about sales etc. . You’ve ignored The amount of features that comes with Cubase for its price & whats included outside of VSTi’s
You could have used your excellent degree of planning to buy other less expensive individual VSTis or hardware instead of buying a generic all in one $500+ kotakt package…
It’s all irrelevant if you’re not a good artist yourself. You’ve confirmed that you need to pay 500+ dollars on kotakt software to produce good quality music. Any talented artist can create something from anything. So then my question to you would be do you actually possess any degree of musicality? Let’s hear some of your music
Citation needed.
Are you trolling right now?
Kontakt is $2-399. Going to Komplete is a no brainer, from a value perspective. Some of those better libraries need Kontakt to run them 
Almost everyone here has Kontakt… Over half the people on this forum will have some Komplete SKU.
And I’m not traveling with 6TB of libraries just to sketch on a laptop when I am not at my workstation, vs. Just putting the entire Komplete on the internal drive and using that. You do you, though.
Too much planning. Lol. Of course it’s just my fault for being better at managing my finances than you. Google is cheap, I heard.
Not even going to see your replies. You’re becoming a bit unhinged and I don’t want you to drag me under there with you.
I’m not going to apologize for having an IQ over 60, foresight and some disposable income.
I don’t have Kontakt nor do I want it.
That’s like me saying everyone has SD3 because I have it. I think maybe you should get that as it’s by far the best drum vsti but not everyone has it.
I don’t have any NI instruments either. They’re nice, but never saw or felt a need to invest there. It has a ton of libraries for it…but nothing I’ve come across stands out as a ‘must have’ to me.
Got H6…not for libraries, but for my own sound design, plus what comes with it fit my live performing needs like a glove.
Honestly, it depends on what you want/need.
H6 or Sonic 3 is quite good for a live keyboardist. The included sounds are quite good for live mixes in live settings. Piles of organs and pianos. Bread and butter textures. It’s also a powerhouse for designing instruments from scratch. A big plus of grabbing H6 is how well it integrates with Cubase.
Ultra personalized demos, attempting to mix and master a studio album release with a lot of vsti tracks, or doing realistic orchestral mock-ups is a whole different beast. On that front, a lot of it has to do with knowing what you have and how to use it, or simply trying a bunch of stuff until something just ‘feels right’ for the overall mix. Here it can pay to get more fancy instruments and libraries, but be prepared to spend a LOT more time teaching them to play ‘musically’. The wrong ‘details’ in the wrong places stick out like a sore thumb, and such instruments can also be a lot harder to MIX.
For me, more often than not…fancy sounds for any VSTi can sound awesome in solo, but are just out of character for the over-all scope of the mix. Sometimes, the simpler instruments in their driest state, like those shipping with Cubase, or part of the factory Sonic/H6 release are easiest to get control of and work into a mix. Particularly live mixes where so many trade offs between what works for mains vs monitors and so forth come into the equation. A lot of the details get lost in the room, crowd, amps, speakers, etc. anyway. Keeping it simple for the individuals in charge of those different mixes is paramount to a good live gig, and the HALion libraries are really GOOD for those scenarios.
Yamaha/Steinberg instruments have a characteristic ‘warmth’ and ‘flatness’ to them that some people dig and find easy to ‘mix down’, while others prefer a brighter/livelier vibe (Roland keyboard sounds for example…feel more resonate and lively to me). Flat and Warm can be a big plus for live mixing! It’s a PITA to have to ‘carve out space’ for the vocals and soloists to shine as they should.
One of the reasons I loath live concerts these days as a ‘fan/consumer’ is because so many people trash GOOD live instruments, and push these fancy/loud, over compressed tools trying to round robin samples that really shouldn’t go together…making it darn near painful to hear. No ‘depth’ to the mix. The tried and true sounds that almost anyone can MIX well catch the most ‘grief’ (people trash them and push noisy nonsense that color everything, and insert FAKE sounding details in all the wrong places). Drives me nuts…
Is it worth the money? Any of it? All depends. Loads of folks I know simply grab demos with need or interest and evaluate if it’s worth it to buy, or just substitute with something already on hand.
Best advice?
Get demos and see for yourself, then evaluate price and all from there.
The best tool is one you like working with…doesn’t matter what anyone else says about it if you like it, and the workflow fits your creative flow.
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A few people don’t have it.
Total repudiation.
Very well said for me too.
Obviously, fancy sounds are how you market your VSTI, and I think that goes for everyone. NI has been doing that for 25 years, yet it wasn’t until using Kore 10 years later that it actually dawned on me that while these were fantastic alone…they won’t work well in a mix unless you make space for it. And that…making space…takes a lot! So in Kore I had 26,000 patches which include 3rd party, but began to keep a “bread n butter” patch folder to actually get tracks completed.
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Hi All,
As a mildly amusing post-script(and an example of being careful what you wish for…),given that I started this thread with the rhetorical question…I did invest on New Year’s Day…in Studio One 6 Pro as it was on sale at a reduced price
And I’ve hit problems with severe audio distortion already,even on a single audio track with no plugins and a huge buffer size.
Been waiting quite a while for a Support response from PreSonus too,plus no access to a forum like this unless I pay for Sphere which I’m not prepared to do having spent a lot of money on the product already.
So I may be back in the autumn if C12 has some Windows 10 stability updates and it’s on offer again.
Plus ca change as they say in France.
I fell foul of the Off-Topic police on another recent forum,so won’t be adding any more to this thread.Thanks to everyone who contributed.
Neil C.