I agree with what you just said. But on the other hand: if you consider such things as the Adobe's Creative Suite, how many people do you think have really explored the possibilities of the third version, let alone the latest? More often then not, we already have the tools we need at our disposal and marketing gets us excited about the latest advances. But we tend not to think it through, the really hard question, which is: do I really need this new features? So if there's someone out there still relying on their Amiga for Midi orchestration of instruments, that system is rock solid and stable for doing so.
I read an interview with Fat Boy Slim in some magazine (it's a few months old, might have been Future Music or something like that, can search for it if you guys want) where he stated that he was used to his good old Akai MPC and couldn't get his head around Ableton Live that he now owns. The simple change in the interface and the way of working made one of the most successful players on the EDM scene of the 90's feeling like he's got to catch the pace and start from 0. My opinion about that: if it works for you, keep it! Specially when it comes to hardware, there's no such thing as out of fashion. Who would imagine in the 90's that analogue would make such a return? Back then people were simply considering digital to be the obvious evolution, adding more polyphony, more complex waves and types of synthesis into the mix.
You're a software developer. So you can shed some light into this, I'm sure. I'm the kind of person who think that the system requirements for such things as an Office Suite are simply mad. It's been doing just the same thing for as long as I can remember and one of this days it will take a 4 year old top notch gaming computer to run the new version of Microsoft Word that I'm sure will be great but will still be focused on "word processing". I came to such conclusions after setting up a machine (a laptop) with a Linux operating system (mint 14 cinnamon) that comes packed with an Office Suite and tons of tools that work exactly like those we usually pay big bucks for. I'm not going for value for the money here, I'm going for performance and the feeling I get that companies push the limits in order for people to keep buying new hardware to run it - while having the exact approximate performance they had before, just with more fancy looks and color schemes.
In music software this isn't exactly true, because all it takes is to launch Diva and you get the feeling that evolution is actually happening here. But I'm sure there's much more love involved and honest hard work as well, compared to big greedy as hell companies such as Microsoft. Many times we're buying what we already have and worked just fine over and over and if there's a brand new processor that's like a million times faster then our first computer, the coders surely will find a way to make it slow again by using redundant code, by wasting system resources on needless stuff that sits next to the clock and stuff like that.
One of the advantages of music hardware to me is that it's out of this equation. 2 cents.
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