Very little has made the cut through the years, but there is still too much overlap for my taste. But I cannot let go of some of these plugins and hosts.
I have thought of selling Reason, and S1 Pro v2 and only keeping Ableton, but TBH S1 Pro really rocks for traditional recording and linear sequencing, and Reason is pretty fantastic for tons of ...erm... reasons, so it's really a struggle to give those up. S1 Pro does things Live can't, and Reason has some stuff that nothing else does. *shrug*
I've considered ditching everything but the hosts, but I can't give up all those plugins because I love them too much. Honestly, the hosts themselves come with so much great stuff, we don't NEED anything else. I think honestly I could do just fine with Live 8 Suite + Max4Live and call it a day but I'm a little bit A.D.D. and I need some variety. It sounds goofy perhaps but the homogeneous (albeit beautifully minimal Ableton GUIs get to me a little bit after a while). Perhaps because I'm a GUI designer too, so I love to surround myself with beautiful things and Ableton is beautiful but plain and unexciting after a while. Need a little flavor
I'm really looking forward to Bitwig Studio, and I think that's about the only thing that could replace Ableton in my kit, and only because it's so Ableton-like still and evolving in a much different but very good direction than it's predecessor. I'm positively fascinated to witness what will unfold when bitwig comes and how Ableton will counter. I really really hope that it stimulates them to compete and innovate even more letting us all win.
My real issue is that I sometimes feel overwhelmed by choices to the point that I have had to minimize my collection to optimize the time spent when I'm actually making music. That's where Live, Reason and so on really romance me into thinking I could get by with just one and be a lot more productive. Add to this that I have a long history of doing a lot with very restrictive mediums (ANSI textmode art work as an example and mnml appeals to me greatly) and I'm in perpetual time-waste mode contemplating what I should keep and what I should toss. I'm a virtual hoarder I think. It's a sickness...
If I could do it again, I'd not buy anything but the stuff that made it into my keep pile. The flip side is that I really liked supporting the developers who I have purchased plugins and software from, but in the end, I've WAY overdone it. I get swept up in the KVR consumerism quite a lot I suppose.
Oh well, lesson learned and experience gained. I have level-upped my humility and wisdom as a result, and made some good friends and learned a TON of stuff in the years here at KVR.
At the end of it all it's really hard to commit to one host, one synth, one multifx, and that's a testament to how great the developers are of this stuff and I give them massive respect. It's a cut throat world for them for sure.
), but now I need to save for Zebra again. 
