It's all speculation, hope and disappointment.
Not really worth the effort.
They can't offer any sonic revolution, because there is none.
Perhaps that's frustrating for them as well.
Their sleepy Japanese managers have not proved hip enough to react to lots of substantial musicians' usability and function requests, especially over the past years. They did a bit here and there, but can you detect any basic effort to get things to a higher level together with their customers? And their customers have learnt the lesson and ceased giving constructive feedback.
The most important recent innovation for the FantomX did not come from the Japanese management, but from a small German software house: the YASE sample editor, without which the FantomX sampling features are not worth a fifth of what they are now. To me and others the Fantom has only become a useable sampling tool since YASE. Similar counts for other important tools by people like Perpextor, and for communication by people like Artemio.
What has Roland Japan contributed to all that?
Close to nothing?
And do they give substantial support to those who keep their business alive, while they themselves fail to do that job?
Could it be that they have become music business bureaucrats who are more involved in guarding their own status in a famous company and the appearance saving of every section, than in any serious effort to keep Roland gear up to the actual technology and demandments of their buyers?
We better just forget about them and check every five or ten years, if someone from their team has surprisingly fallen out of sleep all of a sudden and developed anything substantial after years of brave bureaucrat sleeping beauty silence

))
Let's just spend our precious time with making music.
As I said, the present Japanese Roland management seems not worth spending second thoughts on them and all their *not* developed ideas and products.
If they surprise us at Winter Namm 2008 I at least would really be surprised...
