It occured to me recently, fascination for instruments is always okay for guitarists or drummers, but a "geek" shame for synthesizers, though some the artists in the 70's (Vangelis, Freddy Mercury...), and mostly in the 80's (Peter Gabriel, Gary Numan, Thomas Dolby, etc..) were keyboardists and not guitarists. Plus, in the 80's, they had quite the same equipment set, the one we were all dreaming about, Fairlight CMI, LinnDrum, PPG Wave, Prophet-5, Jupiter 8, etc... It was limited in some ways, but they did the best with it.
Now, since the 90's, you are "authentic" in music, only if you have filthy hair and really poor guitar skills. Keyboard is not an option (except Dance and Electro)... What a waste ;-D
NB : let's be clear here, there's nothing wrong about having hair, personally I still have mine...

OK, the truth is nowadays everybody's get dozens of VST's on computers... and do quite nothing with it ! They're overwhelmed under abundance... The necessity of searching by yourself, to get something useful out of the equipment, is no longer an issue. AND YET, spending days, only to listen to hundreds of pre-programmed sounds on the row, and still no music's coming up... what ABOUT the efficiency ? Uh ? ;-D
Maybe that's why, oddly enough in regard of so many possibilities, music sounds so f... boring and uniform for several years. It seems to me we have no excuse, whatsoever...

Anyway, I tried, for some years now to build a fixed and limited set of virtual instruments, in order to get the best of it, and settle some efficiency (yes, that will be our word for today...) ! It's funny though, because I realize now this set is quite like the legendary 80's equipement I was talking about up there : Emulator X, Waldorf Wave, Pro-53, impOSCar...
Of course, when I run out of ideas with this "fixed" set, I got no problem opening one of those abundant extra VST's, and always find something useful ! Yes, rules are made to be broken, from time to time... Cause, it's about making music... hence fun and pleasure, see ?

By the way, how amazing the internet is for musicians, is a discussion I have quite often with my fellow artist friends ( it's the way you're reading me now, by example, lol...), these guys you find on MySpace, they now have something of a "career" (albums, live performances, promotion, etc...), which (laaaazy) major record compagnies denied to them.
Even if it's not Depeche Mode or Metallica career, it's something real. Ten years ago, without the internet and the technology (creating music and CD's at home, visual concepts, etc...), they wouldn't get anything of the sort ! And now, too late for the major companies to cry us a river, about the evil internet...