It reminds me of the time of hardware. Analog tape machines, compressors… You had one wire, and you had to plug that wire into here and that was is. The connection was occupied. You could not just make up new connections or plugs and hardware was limited. And although we live in a software world where almost anything goes - I mean we can split and sum signals on the fly and add inputs and outputs - you see where the strong ties to the past in the software we use today.
I know a few examples from Logic, where you can route a channel to a new bus and Logic instantly creates one for you dynamically. It does all the necessary stuff in the background automatically (channel creation, routing). In Nuendo you have to open the VST Connections window and add a Group/FX bus as if you manually had to plug a new hardware channel to the software before you can use it . In Logic it’s 1 click. I Nuendo it’s 7 clicks.
Or in Logic you can just change mono channels to stereo or surround with one click. Something that’s certainly possible in software, yet in Nuendo it’s completely locked and you have to decide beforehand if you want to work in mono or stereo for that track. This then leads to huge templates with hundreds of tracks like the one of James Mather, where he has 8 mono and 4 stereo tracks per single sound he does. When in fact he could just have a few and then decide, based on the sound he does, what’s needed and with a click switch the configuration of the channel.
I feel like we’re still too much tied to a hardware world in our thinking, although we live in a dynamic, much more flexible software environment.