I ended up buying a new TI2 desktop, after selling my Snow a couple of years back. It keeps coming back into my life, now I guess I know where they got the name.
I will keep this one though, unless maybe Kemper comes out with a successor which I don't see happening. I've come to terms with the fact that for all its warts, the Virus is truly a unique synth, and even in its current form, is just pretty much something I will miss the sound of if I don't have. When I sold my Snow I told myslef I might get a full desktop one day (I felt a bit limited by the interface and overall DSP power).
A couple of factors made me decide to expedite the purchase and do it now rather than later:
1) Synth prices are going up and not likely to get cheaper
2) I was able to order a TI2 Desktop new for $450 less than I paid for one (that I sent back at the time) back in 2010 by simply importing from germany to US (and that's factoring in the import tax) instead of buying from US retailer
2) Chip shortages could potentially get a LOT worse
3) Kemper could decide to discontinue it entirely
I didn't buy it with the expectation of more features being added or anything like that. As long as Windows remains properly supported for the software, I'm happy. Even with more knobs than the Snow, I don't particularly like the hardware interface for sound design, so without the software it would indeed be difficult to justify.
Most of the "backbone" of my sound these days is analog synths, but the VA sound of the Virus blends nicely with my other gear. Over the last couple of years, I've really built out my studio.. The pandemic kept me at home more, and I suppose shifted my priorities toward spending more time on music, it's one of those constants in my life that's upheld its own importance.
Coming back to the Virus, the thing that strikes me first is just how different it is from my other hardware. Not just the sound... being different is good there. I mean the perspective with which the user experience (both HW and SW interface) is designed. It's certainly learnable and not what I would call hard to use, but it feels a bit like buying a saxaphone that's shaped like a guitar... little things just make you wonder "why?". An example is just going through the presets it seems like very few of them use the mod wheel for vibrato, which is kind of like this universal unwritten law that MW is vibrato by default. But Virus sound designers seem to want that to be cutoff or do something else unexpected. I don't have any Waldorf synths at the moment but I've heard some say the same about their gear, so maybe its a German thing? To me Sequential gear feels very musical to use while the Virus feels so technical.. Fun, but technical and almost in the way of the creative process of making music.
Don't get me wrong, no regrets. I'm enjoying the power boost of the TI2 and feel like I made out like a bandit on the price, so it's a welcome addition to the studio and will get plenty of use.
And at the end of the day it's still probably king of the VA synths overall.