Well you know, whatever interface you use to input, it's an abstraction over the "hardware". Even classical notation on paper is actually not that great an abstraction over physical instruments - instruments can make plenty of subtle noises that the notation can't hope to capture, and which you have to rely on a performer to intuit.

With programmed music, as you know, you don't get that. What you enter is what you get. You can hope that your DAW gives fantastically good defaults for all the subtle performance features, or even an interface to let you tweak them.

And here's the clue to those interfaces. They are very close to the hardware of the instrument (the SID chip) and the "performer" (the playback routine). When the SID tracker comes with a sound table and a filter table, for instance, that's because it's a very close mapping on how you make sound with this thing. Sure, they can always write "triangle wave" instead of $11, but if you know the instrument, you know that $11 is triangle wave anyway.

You know the difference between a typical composer working in a DAW writing a clarinet part, and a clarinetist working with a DAW writing a clarinet part. It's not that the former can never do a good job, it's just that Floex will in all likelihood do it better. And in the same way, you'd need to understand the chip as well as LMan, Mahoney or LFT do in order to get the best out of the instrument.

This program makes use of numerous step sequencers.

Musical staff is a ton of overhead to program.

Piano roll would be a good midpoint though.

And yes i wish they would ease off on the dern hex.