Excellent points. I'll add:
IMHO the Wagener profiles are pretty bad, and the Britt profiles pretty great. Could it be as simple as that?
Agree it sounds interesting as you'd then have a decent back up too, just not a fan of line 6 stuff tbh. As an all in one it still sounds fizzy to me.
Agreed. All those overdrives sounded like a battery operated case-pocket amp to me.
Thumbs up to Michael's suggestion, which reminds me of something I forgot to mention. There is one plug-in that I wouldn't mix without, and that's IK Multimedia's ARC2 room corrector. While it isn't a do-all magic solution, when combined with good room acoustics it makes a major improvement in my monitoring. I suppose many might dismiss this approach for purist reasons, but that would be a "perfection as the enemy of the good" case. It improves both EQ and phase issues without any magic hype. I'm sure Masterdisk doesn't use this plug, but then again, I don't have Masterdisk's setup.
Did you ever A/B a pair of nice monitors and have it always sound worse when you switched because you got used to the previous monitor? Withe the ARC2, it always sounds better when switching on and worse when switching off on my rig.
I have a good anecdote about gear obsession. My friend was working on a project with Andy Johns (RIP) about 10 years back. They were micing up the drum kit when Andy poked his head into the mic closet and pulled out a mic that caught his eye. "Young Eric" he said to my friend, a man in his 40's. "Is this a condenser mic?" After confirming it was, he instructed my friend where to place it on the kit without asking anything else about it. As the session progressed, they never revisited that mic again, second guessing the choice. Instead, Andy fired the drummer and flew in a replacement. I guess the lesson here is that sometimes we look in the wrong places for problems, and the big picture gets lost.
Don't simply rule out stock plug ins. I'm no expert but they are still pretty powerful tools.
read some of the posts on plugins on this site for example:
http://therecordingrevolution.…an-give-you-a-better-mix/
That's great advice. It's better to limit yourself with plugins I think. I wound up sticking with UA and the stock Cubase stuff mostly, because I really know them well. I own TRacks, Waves, Slate, iZotope, Celemony, NI, IK, and I never use them because they slow me down. My buddy swears by the Slate mastering stuff, but he usually goes through lots of tweaking/listening/tweaking to get there. I'll just throw the UA precision limiter up on my mixes and turn the one dial to taste. The Slate can do better, but only if you are in the right head for working it. I've had my buddy (full-time pro) master stuff for me that sounded worse than my simple limiter. Powerful tools with lots of parameters can do powerful damage on an off-day.
I've never used a subscription model, but it seems good to me if you are active in recording. When I was doing a lot of recording, money was flying out the door routinely on upgrades and crossgrades anyway. Many of the plugins I paid money for were basically rendered unnecessary by advances in DSP technology or by built-ins that were eventually bundled with a DAW upgrade. For example, the $500 I spent on Melodyne 1.0 is completely wasted now. I never upgraded, and now I just use the Cubase pitch editor because it is so much easier in terms of work-flow.
Now I only do the occasional recording project and the only plug-ins that I am glad I spent money on and still have are the basic stuff, compressors, EQ, limiters, etc. Besides the Cubase built-ins, I'm mostly UAD at this point. A good 1176 model will never get stale. A secret-sauce mastering bundle from 2003 on the other hand...
It might be the wrap around tailpiece/bridge combo throwing you. Imagine another dedicated tailpiece sitting a couple inches back and it might look more traditional in scale.
Love the guitar BTW.
I tried to make one for vocals and the result was terrible. Basically I put some Auralex on two thin sheets of MDF and positioned them at 90 degrees to make a nook behind my vocal mic. The HF was tamed, but the solid MDF caused havoc with the mids. It sounded like I was singing with my head in a box. I decided to see what the pros could, so I auditioned three different ones at the Guitar Center by talking into them. There were significant performance differences.
The first one was a cheap knock-off. It didn't do very much and was very flimsy. Basically, this result could probably be had by putting a very thin piece of foam on a gooseneck behind a mic. It did something, but definitely not worth the hassle or expense.
Next I tried the SE RF-X. That made my voice sound like I was in a nice vocal booth. It really cut down the ambience from the store and dried up the sound of my vocals nicely.
Then I tried the SE RF-pro. That one was noticeably more effective than the RF-X, with a broader absorption. I've been in an anechoic chamber a couple of times an this reminded me of those experiences. My voice sounded much louder through my skull than from any ambience, which can be a bit disconcerting.
I wound up purchasing the RF-X because it did a good job with the HF, but still felt somewhat open. It was also much cheaper than the RF-pro. It does make a difference in drying up vocals, even in my treated control room.
Let's not forget that a lot of this is on us. Remember when your favorite guitarist had his/her ONE guitar? Now we are a bunch of FOMO suffering, self-absorbed gear-sluts under the delusion that the average listener gives a crap what guitar we play or how it sounds. The subtle differences that we obsess over just don't matter in terms of getting the art out. And I'm a bigger A-hole than most. I own 40 guitars (down from 60), since I've slowly been selling them off. And I'm also down to a handful of amps thanks to the Kemper.
We could probably go 30-40 years without any need for another guitar being built if we all stopped hoarding. By then we'd have some pretty sweet Honduran mahogany and Brazilian rosewood to play with again. But I realize this isn't a realistic idea that would sit well with many folks, especially Bob Taylor 
. But in theory it could work... LOL.
I find it amusing that the whole latency issue wasn't an issue before we all had DAWs and reducing latency became a sport similar to squeezing an extra 1/4HP out of a car engine. You never heard guys complaining that they couldn't stand more than 7 feet away from their amp on stage (7ms latency) because the lag became noticeable.
Any isocab will change the natural sound of a given speaker dramatically through two mechanisms: resonant modes and mechanical impedance. Although the same can be said for a normal cabinet in a room, these effects are dramatically greater with an isocab. The modes for standing waves in a room tend to be bass and low mid, bur in a small box they move up into important guitar frequencies. Additionally, the normal open/closed designs for regular cabinets goes out the window due to the small isobaric enclosure. Absorption and baffled venting can help, but they are workarounds.
So basically an isocab design puts more limits on where you can go with a given speaker. And the speaker that you know and love will sound different in an isocab due to these reasons. The best isocab will be designed around a given speaker, where the bumps and dips and loading effects will be designed to cancel each other our as much as they can. A good designer can work around these issues, but at best it's designing with one hand behind your back. It's probably analogous to building an acoustic guitar out of plastic. It might be decent, even charming, but it won't ever be an archetypical acoustic guitar.
Attenuators on the other hand are pretty awesome these days. I got through the 80's/90's using a resistive Scholz Powersoak. They changed the tone somewhat, but you tweaked the amp to compensate. We survived. 
The newer reactive load boxes are almost transparent, with differences not big enough to require tweaking or even care about. I currently have both a Weber Mass and a Badcat Unleash. Both are in cork-sniffing territory in terms of "tone-sucking".
I'm curious if there are more business analysts, philosophers, or soothsayers here on this forum. I think that 4.0 better come out before Kemper's entire business plan gets rewritten and product line gets redesigned.
Your room will most likely muddy up your sound more than monitors would in any case, unless you spend the time and/or money to get it treated well.
One thing, though - somebody more knowledgeable than me should chime in here - the original Yamaha NS-10s were not FLAT monitors - they are often used as REFERENCE monitors (a lot of people get the wrong idea about these). So IF the HS8 etc are like a "remake" of the old golden NS10s, then they might not be what you want. But I don't know if that's the case.
LOL. In the 80's before I did any engineering myself I would always ask the engineers why they were using the awful sounding NS-10's. The two most common answers were "because everyone has them and I know what they sound like" and "because if the mix sounds good on THEM, it will sound good on ANYTHING". They were used more like Auratones and less like Tannoys or Urei's. They were for making music, not listening to it.
Opening up an API for integration of efx sounds like a good idea; however, it is more difficult than it appears.
Keeping the signal path in phase and time alignment is very difficult. While it would be possible to create an API for others to author algorithms with, such an API would most likely be difficult to implement (maybe as difficult as the KPA main DSP) and would require a complete process for validation to prevent instabilities in the unit (like Microsoft's driver development program).
I wouldn't bet on it in the near future
I think you are making some assumptions about the Kemper OS and DSP architecture, but point taken. But either way, it should be possible to offer a robust API based on the fact that the KPA is a relatively small closed system (compared to a PC OS for example).
I have to admit, I'm honestly not excited about delays or reverbs. The morphing is cool and I'm happy that this update will please a lot of people. For me, I wouldn't mind if the KPA had no effects what so ever but instead had the ability to use profiles of stomp drives or distortion at the same time as an amp profile.
Even the "Tone Stacks" of various amp in the EQ section would make me happier than Reverbs or delay. Reverb and delay can be found everywhere even in very small boxes that are of excellent quality.
I actually don't like this new direction of turning the profiler into a "do it all" box. Leave that to Line 6 and fractal.Please keep in mind this is just my personal preference and I'm kind of puzzled that not more from those who bought the KPA are interested enough to speak out as many of those who want everything but the kitchen sink. It's really hard to believe and somehow I think that silent majority would be interested in dual profiles and tone stacks than effects.
Tone stacks! Yes! Especially one for bass. 
I don't mind the KPA expanding its capabilities, as long as it does so in parallel with improvements to the original feature set. I still say that the effects should be opened up with an SDK to take the onus off Kemper. Third parties writing and porting effects would satisfy more current users while making the system more attractive to potential buyers. Kemper could spend more time on the basics of the amplifier.
I use Gibsons with humbuckers (ES-345, SG) and the MBrit profiles work very well for me. I'm really digging the BOC pack, particularly the 65 London. I generally go for a 70's rock sound, in the Marshall 2203 vein. The London seems to be the best of Vox and Marshall to me, without some of the spitty fizz that an over-cranked vox can generate.
If you just need to scratch an itch, baritone strings on a regular scale length guitar work surprisingly well. They will sit a little high in the nut, but the reduced tension will compensate for the higher action. One of my bands in which I play guitar has a song I recorded with a baritone. I've owned three proper baritones over the years, and I don't really miss them too much. I currently have a 24 1/2" scale Teisco strung A to A and it totally works. For a while I was using an EH pitchfork to down shift, and that worked OK, but for me the Kemper doesn't handle down tuning to A well enough. With a clean sound, it's too glitchy and sloppy for me.
i have a few close friends who are mega producers in the heavy world of things: they've never once voiced anti kemper type comments, hell a few of them were early adopters and use it to this day on HUGE label bands.
What I DO hear from them though is, how absolutely horrible most of the profiles available are haha... I mean some of these guys absolutely DOG loved profilers and profiles on this forum , and rip them to shreds on their tones, and then explain to me why they feel that way....then i hear some of their tones and profiles and...well... Let's just say I can understand why they feel that way! Haha!
Of course good sound is ultimately subjective, no matter who you are. I also think that some of the beloved commercial profiles are lacking, but that's just for what I need. I also think that a lot of big wig producer/engineers make "horrible" recordings, at least to my ears. I used to hear a lot about M Wagener's reamping service and was curious about him until I tried his profiles. I won't say they are bad (no phase issues, etc.), but I will say that they are pointed so far in a different direction from my tastes, that I could never use them. Cheers to the guys that like them though, and I mean that sincerely.
But what isn't subjective IMHO is that the KPA is essentially a guitar-sound sampler that particularly shines in studio settings. Some folks express reservations about using it live, but those reservations would be the same if the players old half-stack was miked back stage with the signal feeding the player's IEM or wedge. I still think the KPA is a threat to many studios, especially those that get business based on their huge amp collection. The KPA will never completely replace studio amps, just like 10 gig piano samples haven't completely replaced the grand piano. But big or small, it's the next piece of technology that is going to bite into commercial studio revenue. As with previous tech advances, the "cost is no object" situations aren't affected. There will always be studios with a Steinway, a Rhodes, a B3, and two drum kits and a real plate reverb. There are just fewer of them these days.
My closest friend is a full time engineer/producer who's worked with a dozen or so name-brand acts. The first time we used the KPA in his studio he was pissed that yet another piece of technology was going to eat into his income by allowing non-engineers to record pro tracks at home. It's not uncommon for even signed bands to come to his studio, do drum tracks and go home to do all the overdubs in the bedroom. It used to be that the bands would come back for reamping and mixing. Now he is afraid that the billable reamping time will eventually go away.
Even a very extravagant sound/rig only needs to be engineered well just once.
