Not much for me to add to the very well-considered responses above. I'll branch out onto a side-track; MOTU VIs.
DP comes with a handful of bundled VIs. Many people try them out and come here all disappointed and upset, screaming (if fonts can scream) what the heck (if heck started with an F)??? How am I supposed to use THIS crap to do my sounds???
My answer: learn them. I never set out to be a sound programming guru, and I'm not. We have some great synth-patch guys here who even do it for a living, like David Polich, so I'm not going to pretend to be on their level. But I've been programming sounds since the mid-1980s when I got involved with MIDI, and I've done it on a lot of instruments, both real and virtual. What I found in MOTU's bundled VIs was like a summary of all the instruments I've seen. No, they do not have lots of features or advanced capabilities; they aren't meant to. Instead, MOTU's synth designers looked at all the synths out there and said "how can we represent those sounds as efficiently as possible, with the fewest controls, for the widest range of capabilities?"
After you've been through about a million synth presets, you realize that they all fall into categories and sub-categories: additive, subtractive, analog, digital, FM, sample-modeling, etc., each producing pads, leads, FX, bass, yadda, yadda... with sounds that range from airy to rubbery, spiky to smooth, one instrument to the whole choir.
MOTU created instruments that addressed these categories, with abbreviated controls that quite nicely capture the essence of tons of complicated programming, simply by dialing in a few variables in different combinations. The instruments make a tiny CPU footprint, so you can run a dozen instances of each with no problem. Need multitimbral capabilities? Add more instances. Need larger, more complicated sounds with more LFOs, etc.? Add more instances and run them combined in a device-group. Need wetter, more sparkly, thump-pumping, spiky, airy, rubbery, bassy, lead-shrieking tone? Get out your EQ and compressors, or sound shaping tools like the Waves C4 or C6, Maxx-Bass, or what-have-you.
You will find bundled VIs in DP that handle the broad categories of synths and programming, and you'll find that you can make them produce amazing ranges of sounds by learning to finesse the controls. But rather than go "is that all there is?" think like a sound programmer: I want to combine this wave with that wave... I want to EQ this until it's almost out of phase with itself... I want reverb that lasts a year... and use VI combinations and other appropriate tools to make that happen.
I realized this about synths very early on, and limited myself to fewer and fewer each year rather than buying more and more. My synth-rack (the real one over my workstation) still has 3 synths from the 80s and 90s which I rarely use, but which are still quite capable of producing a huge range of sounds. When VIs came out, I went wild at first, but I finally limited myself to just a few*, and I've been perfectly happy with what I can do with them. Sure, I could buy more, and use a $500 synth VI to get that one sound that's so beautiful it just makes the music for me, but I can also use the ones I have and tweak them and get very close. No, I cannot match every sound in Omnisphere. That guy's a pro. I'm not. But everybody else has his sounds. I'm the only one who has MY sounds! (not that anyone else would want them)
So, before knocking MOTU's seemingly limited synth bundles, let's consider what I just said, plus the fact that
a) they're free, and
b) they take up almost no room on disk, in the CPU, or in the project. Consider also that you can master these instruments. There are many synths that I've programmed endlessly that I'll never consider myself a master of. These little MOTU synths are easily figured out, and at a functional level — where you imagine a sound and produce it in very little time — you CAN master these instruments.
Conversely, you try to learn a loop library like Logic's, and by the time you even HEAR all that's in there, you could have mastered all the MOTU VIs and finished a few dozen projects. There is something to be said for simplicity and brevity, unlike this post. MOTU took that approach and gave us (literally gave us) instruments that will handle about 95% of all circumstances with a little ingenuity.
That's worth something, I think.
Shooshie
*Those few VI synths are Tassman 4, Ultra Analog, Mach 5 (yes, it has synth controls), and the MOTU Bundled Synths. These always exceed my expectations. I've got many others, but I haven't even updated them in years.
Can all of them record the VI to an actual AUDIO track (for exporting multi-track audio)? Anyway, a huge selection of useful VI (realistic acoustic instruments) would tip the scale for me.
). Then there are some things only spectral synthesis can do but that too require specific programming on the developer's part. I have certain softsynths because of the sound they get without having to cobble something together in a stock vi.