Yeah the HX Stomp is something I'd like to love, but every time I've tried it, I hate the onboard editing experience. I used it 99% of the time on the full Helix and liked that.
The discussion for wanting better onboard control always seems to turn into some "why don't you come prepared with pre-programmed sounds?" like you would be twisting all those knobs constantly when playing live. Live at most you want to tweak a few things on the fly, like fx mix or tailor the sound to the room or guitar. Fractal's performance view, as limited as it is, is enough for that - provided you remembered to pre-program it.
I want something closer to messing around with different fx on a pedalboard, when you have time to do that, rather than at a gig.
With most modelers, it was never that fun to play "mad tone scientist" where you can just try things out and land on something cool. It always feels like being a programmer and that's my day job already. Same for Fractals connected to Axe-Edit of course.
While you can't do dedicated knobs for everything, you can do at least more encoders and better access to different blocks and their parameters. 3 knobs is terrible. Full Helix with 6 knobs is pretty good. QC is very nice to use, but obviously bigger than the HX Stomp.
Boss GT-1000 also has a pretty decent system with the 5 knobs + the view where it shows all block params as a table of 5 params mapped to the 5 knobs so you only need to scroll rows up/down. I'm interested in what Boss will do for an inevitable "GX-1000 Core".
Fractal has the knobs, but requires a lot of back and forth between the nav/page keys and under screen knobs to do anything. Getting to different blocks is not that quick either, even with the doubleclick shortcuts on the knobs because they don't work anywhere but the Home screen.
