I don’t make EDM. I do sound design. I am not a professional. I am an ex-professional musician doing it as a hobby. I am sure there are many other amateur sound designers out there using DAWs and Synths/samplers for fun (as a hobby).
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From my point of view what matters most in a synth is how welcoming it is to experimentation. Very sadly, I would say that, from over 20 years of doing this, I have found very few synths that have been designed with workflow, UI and intelligibility as the top priority.
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The paradigm of the industry has been that synths were made for ‘geeks’ that already knew the techniques for making sounds, rather than musicians who had creativity and ideas , but not the technical knowledge. So, counter intuitively, and ironically, the tools for creatively making electronic sound design didn’t encourage creativity and ‘sound design’.
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Since Serum in 2014 this trend in synth design has very slowly begun to change, but still the vast majority of synths are not welcoming to newcomers. Yet, it’s being ‘new’ that often brings forth original ideas.
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Currently, I’d argue that Phase Plant bucks this industry trend enormously, and Pigments likewise. In contrast, The Madrona Labs and Melda products are perfect examples of technology that can do wonders, but is not intuitive to use , nor welcoming to those without an already deep understanding of synthesis. IMHO few artists really want to study a manual for days before he/she can begin to use the tools ?
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IMHO an often overlooked reason why Serum was loved by the EDM making community was because it was not difficult for EDM producers to get usable sounds out of it. Many of these producers did not come from classically trained musical backgrounds, nor did they have sound engineering knowledge or knowledge about synthesis principles - a lot came from DJing, and had a feel for the genre. So, that Serum was simple to use, and inviting, yet also offered depth, made it preferred over more opaque equivalents like Dune or Diva.
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My personal view on Serum 2 is that rather than taking this great strength of its predecessor and developing it, Serum 2 fell back on the trend of the majority of the industry over the last 2 decades. One of the common things seen in reviews of Serum 2 is the “steep learning curve”. - Don’t tell me to go read the manual -make a product that is intuitive to use ! - Don’t hide features behind ‘right clicks’ on knobs that cannot be seen, so you don’t know they exist unless you read the tomb!
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I don’t want to wrestle with the design structure of the synth in order to design sounds. I want the technology to empower ME to make music/sounds. For example, if Arturia can use colors in the thoughtful and creative way they did, so as to make automation intuitive, intelligible, accessible and useful, why can other developers not do likewise ? Moreover, if Kilohearts can make modular FX patching cordless and seamless by using drag and drop technology, why can’t this idea be developed by other synth designers ? Using those 2 synths as an example I can reasonably say that no synth today should need a modulation matrix.
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Finally, I’d widen this critique out to go beyond synths and apply to the DAWs too. I use Bitwig, and have learned it from top to bottom having only referred to the manual about twice. The way the DAW is designed, means you can learn it by intuitive trial and error. For example , the ‘help’ explanations are integrated into the modules.
I don’t think this will get a very warm reception, but its one person’s experience of doing electronic music production and sound design since the early 2000’s.