@farkas Thank you for a very thoughtful reply, and a nice looking, more focused rack, I think I learned a lot already! To the "taking it slow point," I'm not necessarily planning to buy everything in one go, but a few things are kind of early commits for me (e.g. I love FM synthesis and the Castle looks incredible) so I want to lean into them at the beginning and get some early bang for the buck as it were. Realistically, I think I'd probably buy about half of this upfront and go from there.
The only comment I have back on this build is that max has pretty incredible sequencing capabilities (not built in though, you have to build it all yourself) so I probably don't need the Varigate. That said, maybe it'd also be nice to just plug and play as it were and not worry about always needing a laptop for that piece of the puzzle. I'll reflect on that a bit and I'll dig in to the modules I'm less familiar with here as well.
Thank you again for your help!
my tunes: https://stevehand.bandcamp.com/