Then it seems the real issue we're up against one is mostly of processing resources (in order to get warmth, too many fx or voices must be added).
I find this to be true with softsynths as well. Most of the sounds are not particularly impressive until I add some fx to the mixer channel, and those fx come at a price (CPU of my PC in my case, as I said I'm a DAW guy).
The Ti2 desktop that I bought was meant to be a solution to this in the sense that I would be freeing up my CPU for at least 1-2 super warm patches I thought I could get out of the Virus and have no shortage of polyphony or sustainance for patches with a long release slope. Although it's not the sole reason I returned the Virus, I found that most of the patches that sounded really good were complex (resource intensive) patches which used most of the resources of the virus for a single patch. I've posted here before about the "D50 Bells" patch, which did sound a lot like a D50 (not that I really want to emulate that particular board), but started robbing the Virus of polyphony after maybe 5-6 simultaneous notes, so I thought this thing has the computational power of a pocket calculator compared to my Core i7-965 that I have in my PC. The D50 patch was not the only culprit, and to be fair it is possible I had a defective unit, but nobody here has ever posted contrary information so I have no way of knowing.
I will however come back to the fact that you can get the warm sound out of softsynths, although in many cases achieving it might be a little like your r3 scenario. So then you are left looking for very efficiently coded soft synths that make efficient use of CPU.. They have gotten remarkably better in the last couple of years, and at the same time CPUs have gotten very powerful and acquired more cores.
I know you mentioned Logic, so I assume you're a Mac-only guy, and there can definately be a higher cost (AppleTax) associated with the higher end CPUs, so that could be one limiting factor with regard to softsynths (though still cheaper than a dedicated HW synth for every 1-2 simultaneous poly sounds?)
There has also been a lot written about the "effectively unlimited polyphony" achieved by bouncing down tracks to free up CPU, so if that doesn't bother you that's one option in a software environment.
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