One thing I noticed as well, besides the necessity to always use the same voice is that when you design, for example, a kick drum, then when you play it by hitting the pads live, you get inconsistency ... but as soon as you program it into the sequencer, then the inconsistency disappear...
I believe that much of the inconsistence is because of settling times of the analog CVs in the Curtis chips... if you use voice 1 for example, to throw in a steady kick drum beat, and also use that voice to do an off-beat bass sound, then every time the TEMPESt needs to change that voice's setting from one to the other sound (kick and bass), it will have to reset all the parameters, and CVs... this require settling times... the TEMPEST has no way of knowing when you will hit a pad, so the CV lines could be anywhere in different states when they are then suddenly changed to something new... that gives inconsistency when you're hitting pads live... but when you're running the sequencer, the TEMPEST has the ability to "see into the future", and make sure to prepare for these changes in advance of them really happening, which is probably why a running sequence is much less inconsistent.
This is just the limitations of the analog oscillators in TEMPEST... nothing to be done about it, except use the sequencer, and accept the inconsistency when hitting the pads live.
A lot of inconsistency when using the oscillators as sound soures can be removed by using the same voice, and resetting the waveforms (waveform retrigger) and also maybe assigning a single voice to that sound all on it's own... you may get consistency even if you interleave say; a bas in between a kick drum, but the kick transient may sound different if the bass was not there in between at all, simply because resetting the CV lines from bass to kick to bass etc. will give different results in the transients, that if it only had to switch from kick to kick to kick...
To master the TEMPEST regarding consistency require that you get to know your TEMPEST to the maximum... you really need to go thru that "frustration phase" that we all have gone thru... keep at it... don't let it go... you might end up with something you actually like despite all of its warts
