The way I see it, the less effort and annoyance there is with working with my gear, the more time I spend playing. That's why I want modelers to be functionally really fast to use. They're getting there with this gen.
I could say that we have had good enough tone for over 20 years in digital products. No records were cancelled because someone had to record with a Line6 POD. But we are far, far away from the sound of those devices, right? For the past 7-10 years we have had incremental improvements on the little details of modeling rather than any drastic "wow that sounds so much better" epiphanies.
We are in a phase of fine details that most people would not even notice if they weren't in some firmware update as a bullet point. Like the latest Axe-Fx 3 update has a whole pile of fixes to wrong virtual values and whatnot, yet nobody was complaining those models didn't sound quite right.
Those are important things for the developers of the devices to chase, but it won't kill my enjoyment if an amp that I don't own or have never used doesn't sound exactly like the real deal down to the finest detail. I wouldn't know any better. There have even been cases where people enjoyed the flawed model for what it was because it sounded good to them, and a couple of those live on as custom FAS models.
So at this point I'd rather take a unit that is better to use than one that sounds marginally better.
Now you could argue that if the tone is spot on, then you will spend less time tweaking it, and that can be true as well. I've certainly spent less time getting tones I want out of the Fractal AM4 than I did with the Hotone Ampero 2 Stomp for example.
But I don't see functionality and sound upgrades as mutually exclusive things. Line6 always provides both. There's always multiple teams working on this stuff.
