@Jason, please deeply consider this, hard as it is to face, for all of us:

By virtue of the fact that the politicisation of responses to a pandemic are beginning to be revealed as having a much more significant impact than first supposed, and that these impacts will forever change the face of music, music manufacturers and music consumption - and therefore the instruments we choose - a thread discussing the anniversary of a Roland marquee purchase, within the context of someone still considering a Montage, is always going to be both political and theoretical, because we're all guessing what's next!

It is with that in mind, within the context of your comment on votes, and the manner in which "democratic ideals" and delusions can be abused, that I refer to Chomsky.
If you think it's some kind of sophisticated sarcastic snide snickering, you're wrong. It's a direct reference to the fact that what we perceive as being fair and just (a vote for each of us) is often a mechanism explicitly designed to ostracise, delude, divide and exclude us. This a point Chomsky (and many other media commentators and critics) repeatedly make about supposedly democratic institutions, mechanisms, governance and media, and the primary reasons for his hyper extensive support and rationalisations for the implementations of actual, real democracies.

This is getting far too political for this forum. Ideascale is not the same as voting for a leader of a country or for a particular law. It is simply a way for us to let Yamaha know what "ideas" we like the most when it comes to new enhancements/features on the Montage. We can Up Vote and/or Down Vote ideas to give information to those at Yamaha in a position of making decisions on which ideas are looked at first (or at all). It is not the same as a democratic society voting for laws or leadership, whereby you don't get to take your vote and Down Vote someone/some law.

All of which is neither here nor there, because he's a self described libertarian anarchist, in which he describes anarchism as the purest form of socialistic democracy, not chaos, and you're not being compared to him, you were tagged as a lowercase democrat - ie a believer in democracy.
But you probably knew all that, and were just trolling 😉

I don't troll, but rather I advocate against trolling. And no I didn't necessarily know 'all that' and request clarity when necessary. I don't profess to know that much about politics or the history/intricacies about democracy, nor all the 'isms'. I just know which ones are obviously not something I support nor believe to be the right way for societies/countries/the world to go...
But Ideascale is not something that should be considered in the same light as voting in a country. It's not even the same type of voting at all...the number of votes doesn't equate the same. To harp about Ideascale on this forum too much as being a form of control or not democratic could be considered by some or at least come across as trolling...

(And subsequently, Darryl seemed to say that he thought this actually could work for what he's trying to do... again, in situations where he didn't need the AF buttons for something else.)

My erased reply covered this - but I'll try to sum it up in shorter bullet points of why the assignable function (AF1/2) switches sometimes (but rarely) help the task of providing random access to groups of elements.

1) AF1/2 are grouped differently than scene buttons. They are not mutually exclusive (one doesn't turn off the other) - which is good for the way you use them. Therefore we can only dedicate one of the two switches for something closer to random access.
2) AF1/2 switches don't manage your Part-level switching using mute or keyboard control (scenes). They depend on the previous state so you must also use them only in certain situations where the right scene button is pressed
3) AF1/2 as a multi-bit mux selector for different "modes" on any given Part has an incomplete mapping of states. This is the lesser consideration of why only one of the two buttons makes sense to try to achieve something approaching "random access".

I understand what you're saying in 1 and 2, but I'm not understanding the relevance for the task at hand, The kind of thing I'm thinking about is, let's say your "ninth sound" consists of a single element nestled inside Part 1, let's say it's element #8. Couldn't AF1 be used to enable Part 1 Element 8 while simultaneoulsy disabling other elements in the Part, to provide a 9th sound you could switch to? And couldn't AF2 likewise be used to enable a "tenth sound" which exists as an element within Part 2? I'm not seeing where any of the three things you mentioned would prevent this, unless I'm misunderstanding something more fundamental about what AF buttons can do. (Though I don't understand your third point because I don't know what a "multi-bit mux selector" is... but that may not matter for the purposes of this conversation.)

I do understand that, in my example, we can't then have both of the Part 1 sounds playing simultaneously, it would be one or the other at any given point. So when assembling your package of 9 sounds in the Performance, you'd have to choose for your "hidden ninth sound" something that never needs to play at the same time as the other sound located within Part 1. So if that's the limitation you're referring to, yes, I get that.

ETA: I also understand that, in order to use AF1 to switch between the two sounds "inside" Part 1, you'd also have to have Part 1 itself active (KBD CTRL enabled). So if Part 1 had been silenced via some previous sound-switching operation, you'd have to re-enable Part 1 *and* hit AF1, if you wanted to switch to Part 1's "alternate" sound.