The main issue is that the Salt uses an A7, I thought this would be pretty similar to the A8 but the A7 has some serious performance problems with floating point unless you use NEON
Hey, at least you GET floating point numbers. Some of us have to shift bits to fake fixed-point arithmetic!
I'm also interested in hearing how Ornament and Crime work out for you, I see they offer a Buchla card, very interesting.
It's probably one of the best values out there, in terms of what it can do vs. what it costs. I don't really know much about the native firmware, as I started replacing it pretty much on day 1. Its interface is heavily menu-based, but in return you can configure pretty much everything.
To be honest, if the firmware wasn't open-source, I wouldn't have bothered with it, as I find this sort of interface tedious. But the underlying framework, mostly by Patrick Dowling and Tim Churches, is excellent. Those guys have been responsive and helpful, and I've been able to shape Ornament and Crime into pretty much exactly what I want.
My most recent project has been to build alternate firmware for running two small applets at once (Hemisphere). I've currently got about a dozen applets, which are basically like little modules.
Once that project is buttoned up, my next planned project is an implementation of an artificial neural network. Hemisphere has a Threshold Logic Neuron applet, two of which can be run at once, and I want to build a whole app around this idea.