I'm no expert but the limited experience I have in transferring from synths and semi modular to modular, if that I needed lots of modulation for those lovely sounds. It was both vca and envelopes that I quickly used up so my recent purchases have looked for things that double up as secondaries for those tasks. I agree the disting needs a manual on hand which sucks but Pams is very fluid with barely more than one nested menu in most use cases, and the oled really helps. but for bang for buck, it's great.