The world of musical instruments went through this decades ago.
Yamaha DX7, one of the best-selling synths of all time, didn't have any knobs or sliders to edit its sounds. People loved the sounds, but editing them was so hard that few musicians did - that's why you can hear many DX7 stock presets in 80's music.
The 90's were the dark ages of the synth. Even the buttons went away, everything was in a menu now.
The synths thrived as virtual instruments, where adding knobs and sliders was cheap.
Fast forward to 2010's. Arturia, a big virtual synth maker, said: you know what? People love knobs, let's give them knobs. They made Minubrute and Microbute - and it was a smash hit.
Today, there are a plethora of synths out there, and you can program them all with knobs and sliders. For some (like Mini/Microbrute), there is no screen; for others (like Korg Mini/Monologue) it's non-essential, and you do everything with knobs and sliders anyway.
Modern professional gear no only does away with touchscreens, it pretty much does away with screens to a large extent. And where the screens are used, the menu-diving with minimal.
Because when you make things done, you want to interface in your muscle memory. And you don't want to be looking at things - screens in particular - to interact with them.
So if the maker of my $300 can figure this out and put over a dozen knobs on the device to control every single thing it does, I hope that the maker of a $30,000 car can do the same thing as well.
The DX7 had one slider. If it had had knobs, it would have been much bigger and much more expensive.
And it wouldn't have been much easier to program, because it used a novel form of sound generation which most people still find hopelessly unintuitive.
A Germany company made a programming box for the DX7 with one-knob-per-feature. It was very expensive and sold very badly, even among professionals who could easily afford one - which suggests that the market for programmability really wasn't there, even with knobs.
People don't care about knobs. What they care about is simplicity. Synths like the Microbrute require virtually no mental effort. The sound design model is so simple virtually anyone of average intelligence can learn it in an afternoon. Within a few days they'll know most of what there is to know - which is how to make the same few stock sounds that analog synthesizers have been making since the 1970s.
This is fine for beginners but experts find it very limiting. Brian Eno loves his DX7, and the fact that you can set up the envelopes to make quasi-generative noises is a big part of the appeal. Most people don't get that far with it, but those that do aren't going to be happy with the very obvious limitations of a Microbrute.
Touch screens in cars are more complex. Having a map in a car is a useful thing, and there's no muscle memory. It's hard to see how you can replace drag/touch to set a destination with buttons that are less annoying and more intuitive.
But IME the big problem with touch screens is that they don't work. The screen in my car is resistive, so I have to keep poking at it to get a touch to register. The hybrid design - two rows of soft buttons, one knob, one screen - would be fine if the touch part actually worked.
While there's no doubt many find FM synthesis hard, I disagree that the interface didn't make it way harder than it needs to be.
I am absolutely in love with the Yamaha Reface DX that I have, and greatly enjoy editing and the real-time controls over the parameters that it offers with its mere 4 touch sliders.
I think the direct control boxes didn't sell well because not enough keyboardists grokked FM well enough to mess with the sound live (and didn't expect to learn) -- and also because nobody loves add-on boxes. A better UI, I think would change things. Again, that's a lot of what makes the Reface DX fun.
In any case, perhaps the DX is not the best example here. A better example would be the many 90-s and early 2000-s synths, which were all about menus and you couldn't do anything immediately.
(Microkorg would also fall into that category, its knobs are deceptive: what each knob does depends on the value of two or so others knobs. It's menus but without screens. And it's a VA synth - no reason it couldn't be more like Roland Gaia which is one-knob-per-parameter).
Thanks for introducing me to the Microbrute!! Just watched a ton of videos and I like how simple the design is. Looks like it’s a great starter kit (in the video I watched, they recorded a simple piece then spent a bunch of time tweaking sounds to figure out what each one does).
I learned synths back in the 80s with wall-sized panels of knobs, switches, and patch cords. I loved it. It was Direct Manipulation. I could do anything to anything directly and instantly.
I hated synths in the 90s. All interaction was funneled through a tiny screen. I called it "building a ship in a bottle."
Now several manufacturers have brought back knobs (and even patch cords!) and it's a much better situation.
I agree with the gist of your comment, but the revival of synths with lots of single purpose knobs and sliders started much earlier than the 2010s. Clavia Nordlead and Roland jp 8000 are two examples of mid-'90 synths. I would say I that the demand started with the birth of house and other electronic dance music.
I've tried to imagine a touchscreen instead of knobs and toggles in a guitar... Should be !!fun!! experience switching up settings on stage in the darkness.
Yamaha DX7, one of the best-selling synths of all time, didn't have any knobs or sliders to edit its sounds. People loved the sounds, but editing them was so hard that few musicians did - that's why you can hear many DX7 stock presets in 80's music.
The 90's were the dark ages of the synth. Even the buttons went away, everything was in a menu now.
The synths thrived as virtual instruments, where adding knobs and sliders was cheap.
Fast forward to 2010's. Arturia, a big virtual synth maker, said: you know what? People love knobs, let's give them knobs. They made Minubrute and Microbute - and it was a smash hit.
Today, there are a plethora of synths out there, and you can program them all with knobs and sliders. For some (like Mini/Microbrute), there is no screen; for others (like Korg Mini/Monologue) it's non-essential, and you do everything with knobs and sliders anyway.
Modern professional gear no only does away with touchscreens, it pretty much does away with screens to a large extent. And where the screens are used, the menu-diving with minimal.
Because when you make things done, you want to interface in your muscle memory. And you don't want to be looking at things - screens in particular - to interact with them.
So if the maker of my $300 can figure this out and put over a dozen knobs on the device to control every single thing it does, I hope that the maker of a $30,000 car can do the same thing as well.