[jeffthall]

I can't answer all of your questions, but I will say that Kontakt is an incredible plug in. The amount of third party sample libraries available is huge. Company's like Tonehammer, Soniccouture, Project Sam, Sample Logic and loads more make incredible stuff for Kontakt, especially for film and television. The factory Library is good, but it's all of the other stuff that's available that attracted me to Kontakt.

I run it in Protools le 8.0.4, and it's very stable. The built in effects are quite good. I do wish there was a more detailed delay, but the rest is very impressive, especially the convolution reverb.

I realize I probably didn't answer the most important questions, but I couldn't resist raving about Kontakt. I've used Structure free a bit. I didn't really like the interface and from what I remember there wasn't a lot of third party stuff made for Structure and I wasn't impressed with the stuff that I heard. I also used MachFive for a while, which I would not recommend. It ran horribly on protools, and they haven't updated it for well over two years.

If Kontakt meets your other requirements, I say it's the one to buy.

Hope this helps -