Guess all I'm saying is that I wish DAW Manufacturers would embrace external synths better.. Looking at you, Ableton - no NRPN or Sysex, difficult/non-native CC control, woeful master midi clock for syncing your external gear.
For Ableton, Max4Live provides useful solutions for CC control of external Midi gear (thank you Tau!!), as does the excellent Macrobat and the simple CCRider VSTi (both of which allow you to create Macros that will send CC to external Midi gear, and Macros are ripe for automation), and there are some clocking solutions out there, but a host like Ableton must surely prioritise this effort to clean up its Midi act.
I know, it was initially designed as a live ITB sample-playback performance tool, but it's time to grow up! Time to embrace a 30-year-old ubiquitous standard of the music industry! A 1985 8-bit 512k Atari ST had all the Midi features that Ableton is lacking... that's progress? Ammm, no...
I guess there's another point to make here too - where soft synths win on Sequencer integration and more, nothing beats my hardware synths, not just for their sound, but for the simplicity and tactility of creating patches. A knobby synth is a joy!
Me, I don't connect with deep levels of menus on small LCD screens on hardware synths... I easily get lost, and I can't immediately 'see' my patch, like I can with soft synths, Scope instruments, or knobby hardware. Practise makes perfect too I guess... but life's also too short for that...
Therefore, I do wish that all hardware manufacturers would produce a VST/AU plugin responsible for controlling their hardware from the context of a DAW. At a minimum, it will present the synth architecture visually (I understand what's in Waldorf Largo by looking at the computer screen far more easily that I can understand what's in Waldorf Blofeld looking at the LCD screen: even tho they're essentially the same architecture, I'm far more productive with Largo than I am with Blofeld), and it brings with it the ability to provide easy automation/remote modulation techniques of the (expensive) hardware you've purchased, a-la the "Virus TI" approach, which some people really dig. It's very easy to write such VSTs! Since it is simply forwarding Midi CC data to the hardware...
Ctrlr is a solution for this, but I find it cludgy, cluttered and occasionally slow. I understand that Ctrlr has its place for older synths during whose production run the VST spec did not exist... but modern synths have no good reason for not providing a VST Control solution... Thinking here of the modern synths with which I have experience: DSI Synths and Minitaur - both of which supply (buggy) standalone control software, and in DSI's case it costs money - and Waldorf Blofeld, Novation Nova, Creamware Noah, and Roland SH32, all of which were produced while the VST spec was available.
Yeah, some of those synths have lovely hardware-based front-ends, but if the CC spec is implemented properly, then a VST to support the CC Implementation is surely both easy to implement, and a worthwhile feature that will get folk like the overly-enthusiastic Sound On Sound reviewers giving their unconditional thumbs-up to.
And Scope, well, it is in a league of its own. A high-quality version of pretty much everything that DSP can do - synths, effects, processors, mixers, modular, free devices, routing, ...
A synthesizer for Scope that supported the kind of excellent modulation interface in the impressive DCam Synth Squad would be something I'd be interested in...
. Here's links to video and audio demo's- 
