This is exquisitely interesting level of detail. I've always thought that there was more to the organ I hear than the conceptual mental model of a binary "on/of

This is exquisitely interesting level of detail. I've always thought that there was more to the organ I hear than the conceptual mental model of a binary "on/off" smooth tone generated by the organ - thanks for articulating some of the nuances that go organ playing. That said, I can't help but feel you're missing the point of the article though... There's the old quote: "All models are wrong, some are useful" Of the traditional musical instruments we have, I think 8 bit waveforms probably lend themselves well to the organ (more so than other instruments: strings have decay and vibrato, even other keyboard instruments have decay and tonal qualities). Additionally, contrapuntal baroque music probably worked quite well for the constrained environment the hardware provided by way of number of voices and length of music...