I have to admit that after a few weeks of owning Geist 2 I'm beginning to think that I wasted $99 and have found myself reverting back to Geist 1 - which, although it has fewer bells and whistles and is stuck in a small GUI, just seems to work a lot better than Geist 2. It's slicker, it's better designed, it has a better workflow, it feels less cramped (even with the smaller window) and it just does what it does extremely well. Geist 2 seems like they've tried to hard to make "OMG the most awesomest most powerful drum machine ever" but in the process they've crammed far too much into the program whilst paying less attention to usability and workflow. For instance, having 64 pads per engine. I just can't ever imagine myself needing that many, and if I did, then Battery does the mega pad layout a lot better. When you slice beats, it puts slices across all 64 pads instead of layering them on 16 pads. Who in the hell really wants to use a pattern editor with 64 rows? It's just not conducive to beat making and the kind of fast-paced experimentation that makes Geist 1 such a joy to use. And there are loads of little things about the GUI design where they've obviously thought "well we'd better make an update here as well" but in the end you get the feeling they've just changed things for the sake of it, often for the worse. Like the FX chains and how they've gotten rid of that neat little drag and drop effect arranger that Geist had. 
 
It took them so long to make this program, and there was so much hype and anticipation and I was expecting the Geist of my dreams, but what they released was something which feels like it should have stayed in development another 6 months. I really hope they get their act together in future updates, but for the time being I'm going back to Geist 1 and putting the $99 update price down to experience. 

haven't used Geist 2 all that much but upon release and installation it was a bit sluggish and crashed a few times.
 
they released the last update and that took care of a lot the out of the box issues that were happening.
 
the update makes Geist 2 a bit more responsive fixed some GUI resizing issues etc.  it was quite a long list of fixes for a small update.
 
I think the 64 pads thing was to acommidate the Ableton push /novation pad crowd that wanted to assign everything to everything.  I don't know I don't use that many - I have a Maschine MKII.
 
did you update to the latest and greatest Geist 2 patch and see if any of the fixes made it better for you?
 
I do agree a bit that it seems like they threw in the kitchen sink with features and the GUI refresh, I don't mind but there is a lot there.

I have the last but one update installed, I will try this latest update. To be honest though, even forgetting about all the bugs and performance issues, to me it feels like Geist 1 is the nippy little city car that zips through traffic and parks in the tightest of spots, whereas Geist 2 is the gas guzzling Hummer which feels powerful and luxurious but is cumbersome in the heavy traffic of an intense DAW session (I know - terrible analogy). 

you know you didnt waste your $99- (unless of course it was a choice for life saving prescription medication, or geist2-something along that line)- you know fxpansion brought it out to retain sales in light of increasing competition; you know fxpansion is not a fly-by-night company who will just as soon abandon their product.
at a bargain price, you got your foot-in-the-door of a great vst that will only get better  

I have not seen anything earth-shattering thus far with G2's DEMO, and ironically AudioDeluxe's CC script bellied up last weekend when I went to buy it outright... God works in mysterious ways, but I will take that as a sign for whatever reason. I never heard a peep from them, so will walk away from that one.
 
The OP did make me think on what I "would" like to do with Geist (FX niggles I have), and iZotope's BreakTweaker immediately came to mind. So will give that a demo run, as that (and all Creative synths) are on sale till July 14 for $99 each (60% off), or get them all (plus the two filters) for $349, although Irish 2 and Trash don't look to be like something I would use and the DDLY I already have from somewhere.
 
Quick Update (7/10): Breaktweaker is actually extremely limited as a sequencer, so fell off the plate quickly. Stutter Edit, although an Audio FX, is rather powerful and MIDI-driven, which allows it to be used very surgically (the "Stutter" can be shut off) and in ways that many FX cannot be used. Iris 2 has interesting tailoring options, although not earth-shattering in its own right, but grabbed Stutter Edit (to dovetail with Geist) and Iris 2 during the sale.

Took a look and decided to remain with Geist 1 for now. Hope they get it sorted out.

I like Geist 2 better.  My favorite new features are the per step probability and variable length rows in the sequencer (as found in Tremor).  I do like the extra number of pads as it means when I auto slice a loop, I can use my keyboard to try out slices all the way to the end of the loop. G1 made this difficult to do (and in fact, often the slicing in G1 would stop well before the end of the loop no matter what sensitivity you used).
 
At any rate, I like it better now and I'm sure it will only get better with time.

Yes I like the variable length rows, I use those in Tremor all the time and often wondered why Geist 1 didn't have them. For me though, the biggest bummer is in not being able to limit the number of pads used by the slicer. While I'm sure 64 pads are useful in some situations, personally I would never like to deal with that many rows in a pattern sequencer. In terms of beat creation, 16 rows is perfect. I don't think I could keep focused on which row was which with 64 pads going. And when Geist 1 layered them onto 16 pads you could get some interesting variations going by deleting the "force layer" graphs for each row and setting the pad to round robin or random playback. I guess you can still do that with Geist 2 but you would have to do all the layering yourself manually - a major workflow bummer.

I like Geist 2 better personally. I didn't spend a lot of time with Geist 1, but the new transmod features are really good IMO.

I like Geist 2 better personally. I didn't spend a lot of time with Geist 1, but the new transmod features are really good IMO.