@Kittonian: I agree with everything you've said here; the big question in my mind is that as a past and potential future customer, what can I do to help improve the integration to the point where I can buy the product again with confidence? Creating awareness here in the unofficial forum has not proven a sustainable approach in my case. Not being a current owner of one, I'm not in a position to request customer support from Access for a product I don't have my hands on.
The answer is that without being a current owner of the Virus, there isn't much I can do to improve the situation. I have no choice but to leave it up to you guys, the owners of the product, to lean on Access to address the issues. As a dealer of their products, it seems to me you would be in a position of even greater clout when lobbying for product improvements; at least they should put an emphasis on your feedback since you're both a hands-on user and advocate of their products (that's what I meant before).
Being involved in the creation of technology products myself, I can say that whenever a product continues to sell for a premium price point, there is a perception by all within that organization that "sales are good, it's obviously not broken so there's no reason to fix it". It is only when the wheel starts squeaking loudly enough to affect sales that enough priority is going to be placed on the issue to get anything tangible done about it.
Now for the bad news. In your case, it's possible that having a higher end PT HD system has afforded you better results overall than folks with more modest setups, and I believe your only issue is the restriction on the cable length at this point. Many would envy you, because they just want it to work as advertised with the standard cable length. The reason I say "bad news" is that whether or not you can get the longer cable to ever work may very well be beyond the scope of what Access can fix, even if they put all of their resources into trying. I hope I'm wrong, but the issue of unreliable connectivity with longer USB cables is something I've seen reported with many types of devices, not just synths, and the answer is always the same "stay within spec". This is perhaps because product development teams perceive the goal of pushing their device beyond recommended spec to be throwing money into a hole, something that will work some of the time but mostly just cost them time and money in terms of support.
That said, I will offer a couple of thoughts:
There is a knowledgeable Virus user on another forum that claims there is an inherent 5.6ms latency in the Virus Control plug-in buffer that is present even in live mode; obviously when that is added onto typical DAW latency times, it can be cumbersome. His workaround is to simply use USB for MIDI only and to use the analog outs to his interface. So, I'm wondering if you could get away with a similar setup to achieve the longer cord lengths? It would reduce the load on the USB cable possibly making that connection more reliable, as then its only handling MIDI traffic. Might be worth a try.
As far as why does the 5.6ms latency exist in the first place, that goes back to everything else I've said about leaning on Access to fix it.
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