I don't think we are going to see a Prophet 12 or Poly Evolver successor anymore...nor a VS reissue or Pro One reissue (Both names now are Behringer products so they likely couldn't do a reissue anyway).
Behringer's is Pro-1 vs Sequential Pro One. Sort of like McDonalds has the golden arches, and McDowells has the golden arcs 
That's why I think Focusrite might just delegate Novation to do wavetables, hybrids, samples, drum machines etc and Sequential and Oberheim will just be a "greatest hits" companies for now. Not a fan myself, but the market is there and Dave and Tom are probably both at an age where they don't want to deal with rolling the dice on an innovation or completely new product. I've come to accept that the Pro 3 is likely the last "forward thinking" synth Dave will have a hand in. (He barely had anything to do with the Take 5 promotion wise save for a 2 second cameo in the introduction video. A sign of things to come most likely.) So I likely won't get my VCO/Wavetable poly hybrid so I might just have to settle for the Summit.
I look at it like the Take 5 is an attempt at adding an affordable synth the product line, something like the Prophet 600 was. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't the synth Dave wanted to make, but was more or less a business decision that overlaped with the Focusrite acquisition. Dave might secretly want to make some magnum opus synth that puts all existing synths ever made to shame, but knows that it could not be released at a price point that could actually sell units; at that point becomes a business risk that he wouldn't have wanted to make as previous owner of Sequential, and almost surely Focusrite doesn't want to take a gamble on now. So I'm sure he's always working under constraints with regard to what can or cannot be done. Look at the Prophet X -- innovative and different, but for whatever reason didn't seem to take off.. the large price drop after the initial MSRP indicated to me there was some sort of realization that took place after release.
There are a lot of "weird" and innovative synths being released these days in the lower price brackets, aimed more at the experimental music makers. I would think entering that space seems risky and not as attractive to someone with a track record like Dave or Tom.
The Prophet X didn’t take off because 8Dio dropped the ball on their side and Gerry Basserman has terrible demos out of the gate. It likely would have flopped regardless if it was a pure analog synth or hybrid.
I agree though, I think there’s a lot of brands coming out now that are offering different forms of synthesis that Dave might just be emotionally and creatively exhausted when it comes to developing synths. I know people are going to take offence to this but I sort of look at the Prophet 5/10 reissues as Dave waiving the white flag as it were. Sort of coming full circle and finally giving the fans a reissue of what they kept complaining about. Not saying he didn’t want to do it or isn’t excited about it but I think after the disaster with the Prophet X and the mixed reaction towards the Pro 3, I sort of get the feeling Dave said “For fuck sake. Here! A Prophet 5 reissue. Happy?” and he is burnt out in regards to innovation or he might feel that innovation isn’t really what people want and I would say, judging by most of this forum, he’s right.
So yeah, once I get the Pro 3, that might be it for me in regards to Sequential. Unless they come out with something mind blowing to me, I’ll consider Sequential bankrupt in regards to innovation and creativity. Time to move on.
Roger Linn had a great quote “If Henry Ford asked everyone what they wanted the most, everyone would have told him that they wanted a faster horse.”
So I guess I’ll just be watching everyone on their horses while I wait for my car and honestly...I’m fine with that.
I have a very different take on it all. I am very much a technology oriented person and always have been. I like being an early adopter of tech gadgets and what not (to a point). And no doubt the reason I gravitated toward synthesizers as my instrument of choice had a lot to do with the merging of music with technology.
But, more and more, I view a synthesizer as a musical instrument, more similar to a piano, guitar, violin, saxophone, etc. except that technology enables this particular instrument to cover a wider range of musical roles. But I still think that a synthesizer has a certain set of fundamental roles it should play in music. And while it is cool to get all sorts of weird noises out of them or do experimental things at the end of the day, I believe one synth differs from another in the way it handles the basic categories of synth sounds -- and it is these sounds that create the fingerprint of that instrument.
I believe Dave's view of the synthesizer is more like mine -- a synth as an instrument which should be refined or tweaked in very modest ways so as not to bastardize the definition of what a synthesizer is considered to be. I mean would a Stradivarius still be a Stradivarius if someone decided to be innovative and bolt a vocoder onto it, or some sort of modulation device that let the player modify the tone? It ceases to even be a violin at that point.
Then of course there is the view of a synth as a technological gadget designed to make music. I believe that view fuels the desire for new and interesting features, radically different approaches to making sounds, and so forth. And, I think there is not a right or wrong view.
And maybe my generation (not boomer like Dave but GenX instead) will be the last of the mohicans that believe a synthesizer should be more music instrument than computer. But that's how I feel. And I could be wrong but I think Dave is of the same mindset.
In other words, congnitively I do not map or equate synthesizers to other forms of tech advancements like automobiles for example. Musical instruments are just different and there's a lot of value in their historical attributes.
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