Yeah, it does make sense from a business perspective!
But it's a tricky road, that one! They also have in mind, presumably, that it would become the most wanted plug-in of all time - I'm sure most will agree on this; and piracy would be a great concern...
I get your point, but still feel like there's some uses for hardware digital to this very day! Even for studio work, there's still some uses for it! One advantage is the immediacy of the editing, the physical tweaking - which contributes to better, more inspired sounds. I'm among those who don't feel that's subjective at all! The other quite obvious advantage is saving computer's resources for demanding sounds, using unison for example.
With a good editor (and there's good ones out there now!), you can run it all smoothly without worrying about latency or timing problems, using good old midi and the audio outs. I like how Ableton has the driver error compensation feature, really useful for recording, managed to get sample accurate timing with that thing!
(for those in need of proper midi sync, check Expert Sleepers' stuff btw)
I don't think the sound is outdated to, nor its features... I mean, those old samplers had much less resolution then you get now, their memory just a breeze, some even used old formats that don't easily get by these days, or old converters - some are even praised for them, like the MPC 60, but a lot of that is just plain hype of course. But honestly don't see it happening like that for VA hardware, at least not this soon. I could easily see more manufacturer's doing something similar to Roland's Aira System 1 with its plug-out thing, allowing the same synth to incorporate a lot of different engines with their corresponding editors on screen. But then, I didn't even like that one, but still think it's a cool idea.
The way I see it, performance does matter (check new features on Cubase 8, for example) in a world where track counts can get huge! I'm always looking out for solutions to improve on this, and having some hardware does help indeed, as does stuff like Universal Audio, for example.
Think they may just go ahead and release the TI3 and keep things as they are! Clavia has done well with their new Nord Leads (A1 and 4), there's still demand for some sort of modern replacement for the Nord Modular (if only NI would listen and do some sort of Reaktor maschine when they go v6), Novation has also done well with their Ultra. Waldorf's Blofeld is another great one! Capable of very peculiar sounds. All of these combine very well with the Virus in a mix, or you can feed them to other hardware, specially euro rack stuff - much easier to do then with software plug-ins. Cheers!!
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