Panning within Sonar and its synths

I've been playing around learning how to create sounds from scratch using X2 Producer and its various synths.  I've found that panning, both in the synths and in Sonar doesn't behave like I'd expect it to at the extremities.  If I pan a sound slowly towards one side, there's a very uneven step between almost hard right or left, and actual hard right or left.  I would like the sound to slowly disappear from the far side, not suddenly go from obviously sounding to gone in a single bound.  This makes for unnatural movement.

Does this have anything to do with the pan law ?  Or is it just a matter of resolution of the knob tracking or CC range ?

Does one normally combine some form of level control with the pan control to get smooth operation at the extremities ?

Also, looking at z3ta+2's output through a vst oscilloscope, things can go really hairy at the pan extremities on the two filter busses, mostly on the right channel.  A hair off hard right and the signal (say a sine with a couple of harmonics) is nice and steady, but go full hard right and the output of both channels goes completely haywire (as it does in a bunch of other situations as well).
 
Speaking of panning, in Rapture and Dimension Pro, the pan EG only allows for going from center to one side or the other.  You can't pan an element from right to left.  Sure you can work around it with LFOs and the steps generator and some tricks that b rock has already worked out for us, but it seems a strange limitation in such powerful synths.  I've had to create midi control envelopes that operate the element pan knobs to overcome this.
 
Z3ta+2 has bipolar EGs, but you can't pan an oscillator, you can affect just about every parameter except pan.
 
It seems to me that being able to have different parts of a sound moving around in the stereo field would be a very important part of sound design, but the lack of control over panning makes me wonder.  Is (non lfo/cyclic) panning of a sound's constituting pieces always handled from outside the synth ?
 
 
 

There are two pans when dealing with MIDI. The MIDI pan and the audio pan. When you plan to use pan with your mix from a synth try to keep the MIDI pan centered. Use freeze to create the audio and you can pan that audio. This will give you more options and eliminate a conflict with MIDI being panned to one side and the audio being paned to the other.