I have to agree with you on that point!
That's one of the reasons most people love their hardware synths, you usually get to know them inside out and then it's a breeze to get new sounds of them!
But there's plenty of software ones that can get pretty damn complicated that are quite good for more daring stuff. On the back of my mind would be Zebra, FM8 with it's amazingly flexible envelopes and FM engine (I personally don't like the filters on it...), Absynth that's got to have one of the most complex engines I've seen thus far, capable of producing the most intriguing sound atmospheres with tons of very organic sounding movement.
Of all those, the one I like to use more is of course Zebra. One of the reasons for that is the layout. Waveform editing is a breeze, even custom designed wavetables can be quite fast to achieve. Then there's the oscillator fx which just add tremendous possibilities to the equation. It can also drive all this as far as x11 unison voices per oscillator, no matter the complexity of the oscillator itself. But you can't do that with an FM oscillator, those are quite simple, sort like DX style oscillators were.
I think for a modular style synth with so much going on, the cable free interface with the columns has actually made it quite easy to accomplish hugely complex patches quite fast. Even the way it lets you arrange the modules themselves, switch their order, turn them on and off, so forth and so on, is quite ingenious. And I'm expecting something out of this world to come with the 3rd version of it - there's already much talk on their KVR forum about that! Very promising!
Being a Virus guy, I've got that famous manual called "programming analogue synthesizers" by Howard Scarr and was pleased to catch up with him again on U-he's stuff, and think it's kind of natural that synth aficcionados and sound design enthusiasts regard Zebra as a go-to synth!
If you get into the sound designer frame of mind, you'll quickly begin looking at instruments and their different feature sets and after some experimentation ('cause you don't know something just from the feature list) you decide on what something can do that others can't or what it can do better then others. To my mind, the implementation of Unison on Diva is something that completely sets it apart from the competition and can deliver sounds you can't get elsewhere! Plus, it can deliver in the most simple of sounds with very impressive results: it's used a lot for the plucky sawtooth bass you find on most trance genres, for example - even the computer music version can do that brilliantly!
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