File this under: You learn something new every day.
For the longest time I always thought that for the most part sampled instruments were superior to physically modeled instruments. Two things recently changed that. First, I read a comment that said PianoTeq (a modeled piano program) was much more realistic sounding than any of the dozen or so sampled piano plugins I currently own. I didn't believe it at first because I always assumed that sampling instruments are actual sounds of a real instrument, and you can't get better than sampling the real thing. But I downloaded the trial version of PianoTeq, which features not only acoustic pianos, but electric pianos, and a variety of other stringed instruments, like harps, and even Chromatic percussion instruments xylophones and steel pans. Modeled instruments also offer a much bigger variety of ways to adjust the sounds, from simple tonal adjustments to creating new and unique sounding instruments.
And secondly, I googled "sampled vs. physically modeled instruments" and was surprised to see how many people prefer modeled instruments over sampled. It came as a big surprise to me.
My favorite go-to Piano plugin was NI's The Giant. But a side by side comparison with PianoTeq, left The Giant sounding muddy and unrealistic.
The same is true for the Hammond Organ. The modeled version of GG Audio's Blue3 is vastly superior to many sampled versions.
One of the few exceptions is drums. I found that Superior Drummer 3, has much more realistic sounding drums than a modeled drum program. Also many of my sampled guitar plugins sound more realistic than their modeled counterparts.
I don't really understand what goes into creating a modeled instrument (lots of math involved). I understand sampled instruments, you take microphones and record samples of each note or drum, and sample it a dozen times at different velocities and setups.
But the more realistic and the bigger variety of sounds you get from sampled instruments, the bigger the size of the program.
Superior Drummer 3 sounds excellent but it's 230 GB in size. But it's the most realistic sounding drum software I've heard.
So I guess depending on the instrument many physically modeled programs do sound a lot better than their sampled counterparts. And what I took away from all of this is, 1-You can learn something new every day and, 2-It pays to do research, even when you think you know it all!