Surprise, surprise, if you replace most of the c level executives with people that have no clue of the unique space that Native Instruments and its brands operate in, things start to go downhill.
There are still a bunch of very skilled and passionate people working there, but NI really needs to shed all of the weight and refocus on what it has been built on.
I think it's more due to things like - the brilliant founders are no longer there...folks like Stephan Schmitt used Reaktor (node-based audio DSP environment) to prototype so many products over the years, hard to find a bigger product evangelist than founder/COO/CTO types who eat their own dogfood.
When they released Massive X it was way too early, clearly a cash grab and IDK if they ever added back basic UI features like "navigate menus with arrow keys" that worked in all previous versions. Then there are clearly decades of technical debt that still need to be addressed - I stopped using Reaktor and Kontakt several years ago because the tiny anti-aliased fonts still used in various key places are literally too painful to look at.
There products are probably better than ever. But like from their marketing material:
"Komplete 15 Standard includes over 95 premium instruments and effects, over 50 Expansions, and more than 50,000 sounds. Get to know some of the highlights below."
10 years ago their complete had like 8 synths and you knew what you're getting. Now you're still getting that and 50,000 sounds, and so it feels like before, you were paying $1-2k for 8 instruments you used all of. Now you're paying similar for all this stuff and you're only using 5% of it, and it just got to the point where I really wanted to simplify my workflow and just use a couple of synths. I still use Kontakt, but I don't think I use anything else, and even Kontakt is crazy since it makes up for a big chunk of that 50k samples.
I would say only Kontakt and Guitar Rig are in good shape.
Reaktor is abandonware at this point. Massive X is still lacking basic features. Absynth 6 is basically a new GUI over the old engine from 2009. Etc.
Some corp will likely buy. And all the NI sounds will get absorbed into music generation via AI, alas and hooray.
