With its digital oscillators and filters, I can understand why people say that the KingKorg has a mediocre generic sound quality. And yet, I was surprised at how much there is to like about the KingKorg, given that I think it was designed to be cheaper than what we are used to (e.g, with Dave's instruments). I don't like the feel of the keybed, and I can't say that I would be tempted to buy one. Like you, I'm very used to having a nice stereo field, and when I don't hear that, everything sounds less inspired.
But it's extremely versatile: there are filters to mimic Prophet 5, Oberheim, Moog, Korg, Mellotron, and various others. You can do splits and layers, which gets pretty flexible given that you can have the equivalent of more than two oscillators on each. I immediately heard some patches that I loved and thought that I could never get out of my Rev2's... But when I really started to copy certain patches, I found that I could often get surprisingly close with the Prophet. What I love is that there are a lot of classic synthesizer patches to mimic many/most famous songs, and many of those patches are programmed really well... in sort of a simple way (not much modulation).
I kept thinking about how much more successful the '08 or Rev2 would be if Sequential had invested and prioritized getting similar quality classic patches. Many, many keyboardists love those old, familiar sounds; they are what got us excited about synthesizers when we were young. Then you buy a Prophet '08 and find that you really don't dig most of the patches. I decided to try to copy a few patches into the Prophet gear... and I ended up doing quite a few. The parameter values don't line up exactly, but I just went through using the initial values and my ears. I was really surprised how similar the oscillators and basic filters often were. At times, they sounded identical. I used creativespiral's templates and then slowly copied a patch, and then dumped it into both Rev2's w/panning... and then smiled at how much better the patches were on the Prophet. But frankly, if I had two KingKorgs panned in a similar way, it would probably often sound nearly as good.