For the Rhodes mallet sound - I'm not sure what the Kronos offers in this department although due to modeling (which Montage does not have) - I imagine they could have a "soft" to "hard" mallet - with gradients between. For Montage, you do not get the gradients - but you do get a collection of Rhodes samples which span the range of soft to hard. Not exactly mallet - but if you adjust the assignable knobs for Rhodes - you'll find one of the knobs which controls the tine "noise" and keybed wooden "thump" sample - which does a great deal of transporting yourself in front of a Rhodes (mind's eye type reference). So find the mechanical noise and adjust to taste if you have not already discovered this.

Certainly, there may be other tricks you can play with the envelopes or EQ to generate a new Rhodes performance which has a mallet response you prefer over the presets. Fortunately, the recorded Rhodes do span from felt, to rubber, to plastic tip hammers - so there's enough content to work with.

For the touchscreen - the Korg does support "drag" features - like when you drag the grand piano's lid to adjust how open it is. And, although I have hardly any time on the Kronos, I imagine that patching the analog synth can be done with drag operations.

As you explain - you prefer accuracy over allowing to drag - and I had covered this in another topic - that it's a tradeoff and accuracy. And as you mention - accuracy is valued (by most) over the marginal benefits of dragging.

I'm glad you quickly figured out the motion blur + animation disable "trick". As I've mentioned before, I think Yamaha should consider making these as disabled the default. Others take much longer and vent here before finding resolution by disabling these. Certainly some users do not leverage this resource and may take even longer (maybe never) to find the "cure".

B3 emulation is a sticky point. There's a couple of metrics. The rotating speaker is one area. A past post has mentioned that Yamaha is working on improving this. It would be interesting to see what can be done. The other part is the core sound before feeding into any effects. I found the foldback didn't seem to match. With a fine-tooth comb, I found some other aspects that were not exactly matching what I'd "prefer". However, I've ALWAYS found - even back to the Motif ES days (which is the earliest pure Rompler I have from Yamaha) that the organ sounds were more than usable in the live setting. Montage's "All 9 Bars!" has lots of knobs to turn to "dial in" a fairly convincing tonewheel - if not a true B3 emulation. And the rotating speaker available is "fine" for live use. The audience doesn't really care as much as we do about grit/growl/whoosh/click/etc ... That said, I am looking forward with anticipation about how Yamaha can answer the call to improve the organ as this is a very common critique.

Yamaha has mentioned taking a look at the inspiration in a flash (IIAF) issue. This is a problem with compatibility of certain waveform encodings. I see that every once and a while if there's a need for a particular portion of IIAF that enough people say they need (and also not already redundant within Montage) - then easysounds will provide a custom conversion.

Have you discovered the jazz and latin scat performances yet? "Latin Vocal" which is number 433 and "Jazz Singers" which is number 434 (you can search for performances by name or number) may work for you.

Well, I didn't think about lack of drag on the screen of the Montage. although it's a bit odd that I can't flink the virtual knob on the screen to adjust a parameter. tactile control for such things is always better.

I just discovered the accordion library, its hidden under Organ>Pipe, this is the most extensive accordion library I've ever heard. It has everything, cassotto, musette, bandoneon, european accordions, everything. Love it.

Brass sounds are also great and huge improvement over the Kronos.

FM-X patches, all of them, are expertly programmed and are all beautiful sounds some of which I've never heard before. one example would be "FM Rock Organ 1", with the superknob and SW1, unbelievable.

The categories is another area where users have noticed are not optimized. There are some sub-categories with no entries - or just a couple - where one would think there would be more. I believe Yamaha may have a "back burner" effort to get the categories shored up.

In the meantime, I would suggest downloading the data list: "montage_en_dl_v110_b0.pdf"

A search for "Accordion" turns up the various performances - and there may be more items you haven't discovered yet that are easier to find in a directory (PDF) although the same general search for performance name can be done on the Montage using the category search and filling in the magnifying glass (make sure main and sub categories are set to "all").