VST3 offers almost no benefit over VST2, certainly not in sound quality. It has a few new features that are unnecessary and largely irrelevant unless you have sample libraries that can utilize note expression. It means you can use your new plugins with Cubase. Beyond that, I really don't understand the rush to embrace VST3. I guess it's because 3 is a bigger number than 2?

bitflipper
VST3 offers almost no benefit over VST2, certainly not in sound quality. It has a few new features that are unnecessary and largely irrelevant unless you have sample libraries that can utilize note expression. It means you can use your new plugins with Cubase. Beyond that, I really don't understand the rush to embrace VST3. I guess it's because 3 is a bigger number than 2?

it DOES mean that I can use my yamaha moxf plugins in sonar now that sonar supports vst3 because those plugins were not vst2 compatible.
 
although now that I am able to use them...I haven't...go figure.

bitflipper
VST3 offers almost no benefit over VST2, certainly not in sound quality. It has a few new features that are unnecessary and largely irrelevant unless you have sample libraries that can utilize note expression. It means you can use your new plugins with Cubase. Beyond that, I really don't understand the rush to embrace VST3. I guess it's because 3 is a bigger number than 2?

Good to know VST3 vs VST2.
 
I haven't bothered with ST3 VST3 and I haven't had any problems.  I've imported all of the sounds from the Total Studio 2 bundle and they all work as expected.  I do NOT however do any classical instrument articulations and such.

The ST3 VST3 has trouble with Studio One as well. VST2 works fine.
Yeah I'm no longer an IKM fan, too many marketing practices that seem shady to me. To little caring about the end consumer. I mean I pulled my vsts down when they created a problem for one person and Maize rebuilt the whole sampler and then I rebuilt every single instrument just to fix the problem and I give the stuff away. I'd expect IKM to put more effort into fixing BSOD issues.
Note I do appreciate that nice marketing chap who wanders these forums and tries to help and don't envy him his job.

 I've had issues of IK stuff not working well in Sonar but the problem did not exist in Reaper.  Just what exactly are you doing with ST to make is crash?

For the record, I'm running the Audio Unit version in Logic. I couldn't say about the merits of VST2 vs VST3.
 
On paper, there are a lot of things that I like about ST3 over ST2. As Bit said, the upgrade seemed like a no-brainer. But I remember that the fun began from the moment I started installing it and importing legacy instruments. In fact, I remember exactly how that night of late September 2014 was also wasted.
 
Fortunately, I have a sampler that covers most of my bread and butter needs and then some. But there are things like the Miroslav library which I would like to use. However, some of those patches don't seem to sound quite the way they did in their own shell or in ST2.
 
In fact, most of the libraries/instruments I would have a use for are part of those legacy add-ons, though I have also found more than adequate "native" alternatives for things such as SampleTron. I don't care much for "general MIDI" type of instruments, I don't need another mediocre honky tonk piano patch or average guiro sample.
 
Part of my frustration with 3rd party comes form the fact that we now need to install two times as much software as we want to use to accommodate every manufacturer's own mean of authorization. Waves have theirs, Cakewalk have theirs, FXPansion now have theirs (as I learned a few weeks ago when I decided to re-install BFD), etc. 
 
Ultimately, I just don't like to be forced into installing and/or updating software. When I upgraded the studio computer, I decided to treat it like a hardware recorder and to keep it as clean as possible. I decided not to install a lot of the plug-ins I owned and to only install the essential.
 
In spite of that, I end up with a computer that's cluttered with a lot of software that's only there to allow me to run software which I paid for. 
 
And yet, there are things I can't yet imagine myself w/o - I'm really liking Rapture Pro these days.

bitflipper
VST3 offers almost no benefit over VST2, certainly not in sound quality. It has a few new features that are unnecessary and largely irrelevant unless you have sample libraries that can utilize note expression. It means you can use your new plugins with Cubase. Beyond that, I really don't understand the rush to embrace VST3. I guess it's because 3 is a bigger number than 2?

much like going from windows xp --> 7 --> 10...
i expect that in the future more sample libraries will take advantage of the new features of vst3