Model:Cycles : Great but not for everyone

I must say I love this unit but at the same time I never use it! First it took me about a year to learn it. I am slow leaner and I have kids so limited free time but I did not expect to have to learn and read and watch so much YouTube tutorials!! Now that I know 95% of the workflow it bores me to death. Yes you find amazing sounds but it takes you an hour of navigation and error handling to finally get what you want. The biggest issue for me is that I never finish any project. The sounds I like don’t go together, It gets too complicated and in the end I give up. Frankly I prefer to play with my Korg Volcas! Now there at least I plug it, have a blast of fun for an hour with easy workflow and then go to sleep. Some of the model cycle sounds are just amazing (kick, bass, synth) and if you try with a midi keyboard it’s just WOW because you’ll have more than the 16 trigs to play notes. But some others like hats and snare are just meh 🫤 in my opinion. Also everything feels too manual in my opinion, not enough automation. So you’ll have to find everything by ear, for ex the LFO instead of trusting the AI to fine tune. Take the pocket operator for example, it chops your samples and time it in scale. And it has 16 effects out of the box, press a button, done. Here with the MC it’s all up to you to make, encode, tweek, and at the same time there is no high or low cut off and some knobs just tear your ear drum apart. Muting is ok but the func button is too close to the pattern button and the combinations are confusing and I end up erasing instead of copying sometimes. It’s so frustrating! You can preset some ratchets but again it’s up to you to tweek speed and scale. Not a bad thing, but not for everyone. I guess at this price point I expected more fun and less technicity. The build quality I find perfect though. The unit is hard and very very light, and I like the rubber of the pads and trigger steps. Very soft and bouncy. So I will keep it because the sequencer is good (4 pages of 16 steps=64 steps) plus you can scale to 1/4 steps so it takes a while to retrig to step 1. The probabilities are amazing and will make your pattern NOT boring. Each step can be programmed. And it can be a different sound or preset. Technically 64 sounds each with own tweaks x 6 tracks in one sequence! Again too complicated for me but then you can use as a midi sequencer for… volcas!! But best set up is use volca drum and sample but use Model Cycle for bass and tones. Add a volca keys and your the king of live performance!!And it beats the amazing Volca bass because it can basically do 6 lines of bass!