Totally agree but wanted to add a point I found interesting doing some spatial audio work which is synths tend to spatialize poorly compared to more organic instruments. You can dirty them up with additional effects like distortion or an exciter, but I think it’s something to do with the evenness of the waveforms compared to the real world variance of a string or vocal cord vibrating.
Sorry, but I completely disagree. If what you were saying was true, then physical synths would have the same problems in live performances. I think the problem is not the instrument, but rather how people are used to using the instrument. If you're used to mixing synths for stereo, then your ideas for how to make a synth sound good beyond stereo are much weaker.
Also, there's so much you can do to the sound of a synth and so many powerful synths out there. If you're complaining about the sound being too smooth or simple, you just haven't played around with powerful synths often enough.
I was giving an anecdote, yo. Calm down. Synths in the digital environment of a spatial audio engine, which I've done work in both programmatically and as a musician/sound engineer, has problems with spatializing the unnatural waveforms that synths produce. Humans have trouble pinpointing where those sounds are coming from. It's easy to work around, and no one is saying "don't use synths in spatial audio", just that there are considerations to be made to make them work well in that environment. Just like you don't want to pre-apply reverb because that's going to be generated by the spatial engine.
Here's a link with a bit about sine waves, but I've found the same to be true (to a lesser extend) with saw, triangle, and square waves too.
There is a sixty-year tradition now of pieces for instrumentalists + tape or live electronics, where it is the synthesized material that is spatialized through loudspeakers around the audience.
Completely different context than using a synth in a digital realm. I'm not saying you can't spatialize synths, but that the waveforms are unlike sounds we encounter in the natural world so it takes adding a bit of "naturalness" to them to help our ears understand where they are in the space around us. That's something that's harder to do in a digital environment like a spatial audio engine, but is easy enough to work around. Just an ancedote on spatialized audio in software, which again is different than what you're talking about.
