Gah why did I bother updating to Komplete Ultimate 11

bigcatt
From 9U to 11U, 4 pianos, 10 solo horns, a strummed guitar, Indian and Cuban instruments, 2 vintage drumkits, most of a passable lite orchestra, version 6 of the most famous synth maker type thingy in the world and other stuff. Seems OK to me...

sharke
I guess I always had it in the back of my mind that once the Komplete Ultimate 11 upgrade hit the sales, I'd update it as I have every version of Komplete since 8. More of a reflex thing really. But having already seen what was in it, I had never been that excited about upgrading. Took the opportunity to upgrade today. Wish I'd saved my money to be honest. 
 
I think it's been slowly dawning on me that Native Instruments has shot its bolt and is unlikely to do anything really exciting again. 
 
I really wanted to upgrade to Reaktor 6 since I love Reaktor and use it all the time, and admittedly Blocks looks like a lot of fun so I'm happy about that. Apart from the new preset functionality - it's such a PITA to navigate around those presets as opposed to using the menu to fire up snapshots. There doesn't seem to be any way to just skip to the next one, and each time you load a preset the browser skips back up to the top so you have to remember where you were and scroll down. That just seems like a giant step backward to me, although I'm sure someone will tell me I'm doing it wrong. But what else is there Reaktor wise in Ultimate 11? 
 
Well, there's Forms. Sure there's a few interesting sounds in there, but going through the presets to get an idea what it does, I couldn't help thinking that I'm just listening to the same old boilerplate, plastic sounding Native Instruments crud. I felt like I could be navigating through the presets in Kontour, Spark or Skannar XT, they sounded that similar. It's all very unmusical and unusable. I know, I'll probably come up with something interesting if I start from scratch, but dammit I do kind of rely on being given some usable sounds that I can start with. I really think that sound design wise, Native Instruments needs some fresh blood. It's like the same guy doing all the presets or something, lol. 
 
Flesh - again, an interesting idea, but something which seems like a gimmick more than anything else. Don't get me wrong I love playing around with this sort of stuff when I'm bored, but these days I'm really wise to the fact that a lot of it is exactly that - something to play around with, not something which really ends up as "your" sound, in your song. 
 
Seemingly nothing new in the Reaktor Factory library that I didn't have in Reaktor 5. You'd think they'd push the boat out a bit there. 
 
The Symphony Essentials stuff - seems like they've just stuck that in to pad Komplete out with a bunch of gigabytes of content, but of course it's severely pared down from the complete Symphony package and not something you'd really be able to score anything serious with. And I dunno, it doesn't sound very convincing to me. 
 
Session Guitar Strummed Acoustic: Pretty unexciting stuff. OK if you want to flesh out a mix with a bit of quick and easy percussive guitar I guess, but again it really doesn't sound convincing and the tone isn't that exciting either. I honestly think I can record a better sounding guitar track myself, even with my less than perfect recording conditions. 
 
Ho hum, I guess in the end I'll probably squeeze my $200's worth of use out of it, I always do. But dammit Native Instruments you have become very so-so over the last couple of years. 

BassDaddy
You don't really need Komplete 11. These aren't the droids you're looking for.
(did that help?)

sergiosimoes

sharke
Ah but you're coming from 9U. It's actually a good upgrade in that case because there was some pretty cool stuff introduced in 10U. But from 10U to 11U it's very underwhelming. 

I'm glad to hear this because I'm coming from K9 regular, so my upgrade would be better than good . End even if the orchestral stuff is not first rate, I bet it'll be better than anything I currently have (Sonivox and Miroslav CE and, of course, a bunch of old and new HW ROMplers).