I believe MIDI-CI would require all devices to be running MIDI 2.0 for that to happen, and even then the integration as you suspect would not be very elegant. I am talking about an effort Yamaha could do to their own products, even with the current implementation. They have the data lists, it would be just a matter of storing them in their new products and for the user to enable them separately in a menu - based on the equipment they have. Sounds would be listed in existing categories and pre-mapped to available controls, maybe phrases can be accessed as well; so it's modular in a way, and I would suspect it would imbold people to get more yamaha products - old and new.

With a new industry standard to cover this feature - I'm not a proponent of making a new snowflake to arrive at the same place. I'd rather see the work already started make its way to customers which will expedite the process where more gear can "talk" to each other. Software like Camelot, JM Tools, Cubase would benefit greatly. Some of those pieces of the pie may have longer lead times and are important to adoption.

Analogy: we "need"/want to start agreeing the "Hayes" modem commands are the best some day so we don't have to keep writing one-off terminal software for each modem to do the same thing.

With a new industry standard to cover this feature - I'm not a proponent of making a new snowflake to arrive at the same place

Unless 2.0 would work with current or legacy products, I am not sure how this is a good analogy. Even if 2.0 will be published tomorrow in Montage, the rest of your gear stays 1.0. Cubase already has a pretty solid integration in this regard - there will certainly be other benefits - but profiles, patches, mappings are already there without 2.0, today.

I am also unsure about comparing vintage equipment to old modems or if there was another analogy intended. 2.0 will be backward compatible - the initial handshake will be 1.0 still; I am not talking about altering a protocol but simply storing known data in a way that will make their products more integrated. There could be valuable marketing reasoning behind it. Just saying.

I have no idea what is Yamaha's development bandwidth and priorities, but since they ask for feedback I would encourage everyone to participate. I am pretty certain they won't stop lateral developments to see 2.0 through - even though I am quite sure they will want to be in the lead.

Your initial post listed Genos, Montage, and Reface as named targets for interoperability. I do not consider any of these legacy at this point.

Montage has already piloted some aspects of MIDI 2.0 which might be portable to Genos if lucky. Reface I don't know.

The Hayes analogy was remembering how the industry floundered around with reinventing the wheel until forward progress was made when the arms race ended and standards were agreed upon. There's a "bad hair" stage (first pancake) - but ultimately that gets worked out. I'd rather "invest" sooner in that effort.

Your opinion is valid as your goals are different. We'll see how this shakes out.

On the snowflake front, I've wanted to have full USB 2.0 bandwidth endpoint bulk transfers (bulk as in USB such as used for file transfer) for getting at memory dumps instead of relying on slower MIDI timing. Already songs are transferred this way. Add to that parameters, save files, etc and this would be the foundation for snowflake work.

I'd still prefer to clear a path for 2.0 instead - but we're not too far off in the types of results we're after.

Indeed, my thoughts were around integrating existing hardware, which can be an objective now or after 2.0 is out - it would work the same way. It is not just the convenience of accessing everything from one place - which is pretty sweet in itself - but being able to save and recall everything in one step (be it a song, performance, etc.). To be honest, I am not even sure if Cubase can currently save or recall Reface voices, but that's a different topic.

+1 for USB 2