I think you've made a lot of assumptions that are incorrect and you are mixing up the areas of concern in order to paint a pretty pessimistic view of my position. If you want to talk about bias, aren't you - as a user and owner of Kemper products - equally open to bias against people like me who don't think that we're being offered a good deal?
My position is not based on bias. It is based on experience, both as a user and also as someone working in music tech for almost 18 years now. I posted my video above that shows objectively that the Kemper isn't accurate. That isn't bias. It is objectively true. You don't have to value accuracy, but you don't get to tell me that I shouldn't find it important.
As I said previously, it is people "like" me (not me exactly, but other professional engineers and people with large amp collections!) that give Kemper a huge amount of value, by providing content for the platform. The people who don't profile simply don't offer as much value to the eco-system.
Now I would say that the value in the other Kemper SKU's can easily be justified by the form factor and the I/O, and the hardware details like the screen and footswitch count. The value is not solely defined by the firmware or features. They didn't need to limit and redact software functionality in order to create USP's for the Player. It already had them by virtue of the fact that it could fit easily on a pedalboard full of Strymon and Boss pedals!
The way the tiers are split up seem pretty cynical to me. All of the base functionality like morphing, rig x-fade time, spillover tweaks, parallel path, loop, more banks, beat scanner, stuff that isn't necessarily DSP related, but rather forms a chunk of the user experience... those things should be level 1 and level 2 .... level 3 should be solely effects, and the extended number of effect blocks.
That would be the consumer-friendly implementation of all of this. But no. Kemper have put you in a position where you have to spend an extra $300 on a $600 product, in order to get baseline functionality that arguably should've been there in the first place.
For these reasons, I would posit that the person who has a pedalboard full of effects they already love, are much more likely to look at the Nano Cortex than the Kemper Player.
I think the pricing was deliberately done to extract as much money from the user as possible, in a rather cynical fashion. That is fully their right. But it is also fully our right to be able to analyse it and judge whether we think it is worth it. All told - it isn't the way I would choose to do business, if I had that choice.
