Talk:VOCALOID5/@comment-25224941-20181013043416/@comment-53539-20181013232953

Katsumi Ishikawa took over from Kenmochi Hideki, he is likely rebuilding the software from the ground up, restoring old features that shouldn't have been lost in the first place and updating the engine. I still maintain it feels like they took V2 and rebuild things from there, there are so many V2 missing features re-added I feel its like they just scrapped V3 and V4 and pulled up the old version.

The missing features you otherwise mentioned are minor and likely have been removed due to the fact you can now add the details in with a keyboard. This is preferred for professional producers and is quicker to do/edit. So things like the pencil may be gone for that reason.

I can't speak for much else, without hearing why things are gone its all guess work. To me, V4 was just the least attractive, however, because unless you were after XSY it didn't offer much. The problem overall is you can't really improve voicebanks either at this point in Japanese, you can simply change the way you record them, so for a long time the engine has been one of the few things to change in that version, their still far from perfect in English. So I look to the engine for Japanese Vocaloids to see how they can be improved because this is currently the most major way they can. So when V4 didn't change much, it really was disappointing and a not much improvement occurred. V4 is a period of stagnating progress for Japanese Vocaloids wherein the only thing that happen was the issue of unique vocals being addressed. In in regards to my favourites the English vocals, we had many new vocals but there was an entire year for the first time in a while wherein no new English vocals came out. This in an era we should have been excited because long term issues with English vocaloid were finally being addressed. V4 just wasn't as exciting to me as V3, especially as there was not big party like with V3 wherein they held a special event to announce it. It was just released like V5. I tried to stay positive in the V4 era, but now its over I can relax and feel more open about my feelings on it. V5s in the same situation, I'm trying to be positive about it and for the next 3 years my true thoughts likely won't be known. However when V6 comes out in 4 years time I'll start really being open again on this version.