Yeah it's like the old Digidesign. Sell hardware by making the software dependent on it. We were all happy for long enough but after a good while it started looking expensive, limiting and dated.
UAD has certainly rolled some good dice here. It will be interesting to see how it is received in the long run and the take up of the DAW. It will certainly see some people join the platform and buy the products. All they really need is an interface with a credit card slot built in!
I've no doubt a good bit of the marketing is plain hyperbole. Most of the stuff they claim is revolutionary we can already do in real time. All the "low latency" trumpet blowing makes little sense to me. I've been able to record everything at a low enough latency through the plugins I need for years. Roundtrip over the majority of native plugins is plenty moderate. Those that are taking too many CPU cycles often have a LL version from many manufacturers if you really need to use them to record through.
Anyhow, I'm impressed with a lot I have seen. The time-stretch and pitch sounded much better than the ageing Elastic Audio. These two things are core requirements for much modern production. Avid need to pull their socks up!
The piano and moog sound plenty nice but it's certainly not a revolution. Let's see what they come up with in the future. Hopefully they will go left field with some of the instruments (as they have with the outboard) rather than just bread and butter stuff.
Stephen