Plug-in Design, The Results...

Okay, I went through that entire thread and made notes and counted votes and what-not. Thanks everyone for taking the time to illustrate what your opinions are in this matter. It seems to me that the whole thing distills down to the following statement:

The majority of users want a simple interface, but the opportunity to get all tweaky would be nice.

If we gave a product an extended feature set with most parameters bared, but had a simple interface front and center, with the rest available via deeper panels, I think this would please most everyone. Obviously, it depends on the product, and believe it or not, getting the UI to cooperate with the DSP is generally the most time-consuming part of making any plug, unless it is incredibly simple (like, e.g., Rough Rider or FuzzPlus2, and even both of those needed controls that aren’t available in VSTGUI and had to be invented.) The more parameters there are, and the more panels it has, the longer it takes to design and build, and the more it costs.

So, for stuff like Dubstation and the Liquid/Fluid/Vapor collection, shit like that, we’ll probably not change a thing. Those are single-purpose plug-ins that have a particular sound we programmed in to them. But for the more sophisticated products (and I’m specifically thinking of Replicant as I write this) I don’t see any particular issue with adding another panel where you can control all the filter freqs and envelopes and shit.