John T
Steve's "legacy" category is a great idea. Have that, and have everything Sonar's ever included in it. There's no reason not to; none of this stuff takes up any development resources.

Yeah that might work. Extract them out of the main app and it should be made clear there is no support. Cakewalk gives the impression right now that these plugins are supported when they bundle it with the main app.

In response to the OP. The TTS1 soft synth is a GM2 compatible soft synth and if I'm not mistaken uses the Roland GM2 sound set (the GM2 sounds they shipped with their hardware synths).
That being said, the GM2 sound set is woefully lacking for modern production or 'pro' sound. I don't think that was the designers intent in the first place, the sound set was originally intended as a standard for hardware vendors to enable the same MIDI file to sound similar on any synthesizer. When the standard was created, there was no such thing as a DAW or soft synths for that matter, MIDI files were created and used in sequencer programs and if you wanted other people to be able to play your composition you had to stick with the standard.
In response to the notion that things should sound perfect in your mix using stock patches, it simply doesn't work that way. Music production is hard work and sometimes it takes a while to get the sound you're looking for. Cakewalk makes a couple good multi-sample synths (D-Pro, Rapture, Rapture Pro), well one synth in various flavors anyway...
and an analogish synth (Z3TA) but even if you're a preset producer you'll still need to tweak the patches to fit your composition.
Bottom line, no soft synth is going to give you exactly what you want without tweaking, that's just not how pro works. That's not Cakewalks fault.

The GM soundset standard, where particular instruments are associated with particular channels (e.g. Drums on 10, piano on 1) was invented back in the days when computers had memory and drive sizes measured in megabytes not gigabytes and processing power was a tiny fraction of what it is now.

It was useful back then because it meant that a games designer or multimedia designer could include a MIDI file to play any required music rather than having to use much larger audio files. The idea was that soundcards like the Soundblaster had an onboard GM synth chip or if all else failed the computer's MIDI player, such as the MS software synth, which is still there today, would step in and do the job. Use of GM soundsets still turns up once in a while, though for games and multimedia it's long been superseded.

Realistic sounds with lots of articulation wasn't what it was about. It was about ensuring that a MIDI file would be playing the right "instruments" on any computer or any sound module that complied with the GM spec. Later, additions such as Yamaha's XG, built on GM.