Price aside, a Hydrasynth Deluxe would be cool. It would give you Poly AT, plus it's a different kind of synth of its own.

Here's another option you might like. It's a brand-new product on the market. You can pre-order at Sweetwater.com if you live in the USA.

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Studiologic Numa Compact X SE 88-key Stage Piano $899.95 - NEW PRODUCT.

88 semi-weighted keys with Aftertouch, an enhanced factory sound bank, and newly developed acoustic and electric piano sound engines. Improved organ and synth engines. A series of nine drawbars and a slider. Natural-sounding onboard speakers - 10+10-watt amplifier and 2 speakers with adjustable bass, treble, and mastering 3D controls. Headphone jack. 148 high-quality built in sounds and a max polyphony of 200 notes. Realistic string/duplex resonance and damper/hammer noise courtesy of the revamped acoustic engine. With the electric piano, users can fine-tune the tine control and damper noise to hit that sonic sweet spot. Programmable drawbars can also be used to send MIDI messages. Three default velocity curves, pedal inputs. Up to 1GB of internal flash memory, including eight sound banks and 120 programs. OLED display. FX processor that offers a dedicated control section and can perform up to six effects simultaneously. It only weighs 15 1/2 pounds. 4 unique sound engines. You can connect to the Numa Manager app for even more features and firmware updates. The keybed is similar in feel to the Kurzweil PC3-76-key. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSXuUXtEzKA&t=3s

I’d look for a keyboard controller with aftertouch (preferably poly), a good compliment of controls, several pedal inputs, and a built in audio interface to simplify your setup as much as possible. I think the Korg keystage 61 might do the trick except 61 keys is it’s max right now, and those keys aren’t weighted if your looking for that. I purchased a used nautilus 73 as an ESP gigging keyboard, but I haven’t transitioned to using it yet … I currently gig with a MoDX, pedalboard, and Camelot on iPad.

Thanks for your answers. 

I bought the Numa Compact X SE... but despite the excelent keybed action, everything else is a crap... got it new, but screen came unaligned with the unit :-), buttons are fragile, and midi is sooooo buggy. 

In the other side, the Montage ESP has several problems for live musicians: no program change features... and CPU consumption is ridiculous...

Hence, planning to buy a Modx+7 for my tours... but keybed sucks... I understand Nord users (I used to be one).

Best controller is montage 🤣 ! Depending your needs.

Roland A-88MKII

-very well-built
-compact
-midi 2.0 compatible
-terrific 88 piano keys
-good enough set of controllers - buttons and knobs

cons
- no aftertouch

Posted by: matt

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In the other side, the Montage ESP has several problems for live musicians: no program change features...

That's surprising. If it's a software implementation of the Montage M, shouldn't it respond to the same Program Change commands that the hardware does? But failing that, can you change patches by running it inside a host like Gig Performer or Camelot Pro?

... there should be some way that's not menu driven to tell the VST to switch to a Performance.   The "should" here is an expectation - not an informed reflection of what is currently available.

According to Joel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gllwkD8CbKo

The VSTi doesn't respond to MSB/LSB/PC so if one single Camelot "scene" needs to call two different Performances the workaround is to use two instances of the VSTi.  One instance loading one Performance and the other instance loading the other Performance then you can Camelot scene switch between the two.

Joel also "complains" about this limitation so perhaps a later version will support this.

That said, it appears that each ESP configuration you plug into Camelot has which Performance it should load associated with it so this would be a matter of setting up each of your configurations in Camelot to call up the Performance you wanted.  This isn't MSB/LSB/PC based but rather an association that I imagine is a settings based thing that is saved in Camelot (or the VSTi host).

The limitation is more that after you load up a Performance there's not a way to send a MIDI message to change the Performance and instead need to use the VSTi host to call up a different Performance.  I don't know if Camelot Pro itself has a way to send a MIDI message to tell it to load a new "patch" (Camelot calls these "Songs" ).    According to this page:

https://kb.audiomodeling.com/en/c/how-to/d/camelot-tutorial-10-remote-control/

There's a way to select the song by CC32 or also assign some control for going to the next/previous song.   So I would say set up your song list within Camelot then use the Camelot remote features to remotely call up different ESP configurations.  This should be the necessary "glue" to get from point A to point B.

Since Camelot is just another VST host with some customizations I imagine (maybe) one could get the same thing done using Cubase AI which comes at no cost with the Montage.  To provide a "wrapper" for ESP that would recall different patches.   Probably someone else could chime in who's more of a Cubase user than me.   In the past this is part of what Montage Connect was for (but using actual hardware, not a VSTi).  The lack of this kind of software may mean Cubase has some form of managing this without Connect (and, in this case, applied to a VSTi).