There where many things in development and on the internal radar prior to the sale of AIR to inMusic. VST support was one of them.
There were a handful of us who were big advocates of this at the time. Some of
our crazy workarounds were, well,
pretty crazy.
A majority of the AIR instruments are 7 years old now. This team came from Avid's purchase of
Wizoo in 2005, who were developers of VST, AU and RTAS plug-ins. First out the door from AIR was Xpand(developed from Wizoo Hypersonic) and Hybrid. These were followed by Strike(developed from Wizoo Latigo & Darbuka), Velvet, and the others. Though it's good to finally see support for other formats, it's been a long time coming. I'm glad I don't have to do those old crazy workarounds anymore.
Shane