Other than a program banks manager, I've never understood the point of such software for editing sounds on a computer screen, when the hardware synth offers 55 physical knobs and 35 real buttons that are just waiting for you to tweak with your bare hands !?
And since almost anything can modulate anything else on that same hardware synth, the automation feature seems rather pointless too...
Am I missing something ? But maybe I'm too "old school". After all, I'm 10 years older than my 1975 Minimoog D... ;-)
I can tell you why some would want an editor, sine I'm a heavy user of editors... I'm actually so used to them, that working the REV2 from the front panel is frustrating to me, and this is why:
I get a much better overview of a program I'm working on, when I can see all and every parameter on the screen at one time... my own editor has ALL parameters on ONE single screen, even both layers.... I can't state enough how much faster it is to program sounds this way.
Yes... you get A LOT of tweakability on the REV2... but it's nowhere near the same as using an editor still... the REV2 is basically a "one layer front panel"... that means, that if you only edit a single layer, it might be fine using the front panel, but as soon as you enter layer B, then all controls no longer fit the parameter values... and if you tweak any, then layer A will not be the same anymore either... that fact is more than enough to warrant the use of an editor.
But also the LFO section has this problem in even a single layer since you control four of them using the same controls... also a lot of the essential parameters are hidden away in the MISC PARAMETERS section... also try programming the four gated sequencers effectively from that small stepped display... using a screen with all four lined up perfectly under each other is a lot easier... not to mention the mod matrix as well.
In short: REV2 is in no way a one-knob-per-function synth... it cannot be with all those parameters... thus having a good editor is crucial to me at least... especially when you start to mess with creating stacked programs... then it's really handy to be able to quickly see and edit both layers at the same time because the two sounds very often play together a lot. Programming from an editor saves a h*** of a lot of time too.
That's my explanation of why editors are popular