I don't think VSTs are a fair comparison to hardware synths. They may be used a lot in the studio but there's a very different niche for real synths and the gap

I don't think VSTs are a fair comparison to hardware synths. They may be used a lot in the studio but there's a very different niche for real synths and the gap is closing in the opposite direction lately. It used to be you had a handful of audio units to emulate specific hardware synths. Now hardware is getting flexible enough to handle a lot of different flavors.