You mention playing a piano versus doing an electronic rendition of it. Well, the human body is a marvelous thing and is able to do things physically at the speed of your brain.
But with a computer, at some level, you have to tell it how to do everything. But if you are tweaking knobs from one end to the other, then that's not going to get you anywhere, either. Your computer speakers are not going to faithfully produce the sound an acoustic piano makes in a room without you having to "tell" it what the reverb looks like, or how far away from the piano you are, or whether the lid is open or closed or somewhere in between. Perfectly tuned MIDI piano will never faithfully reproduce the overtones that occur when strings on a piano are vibrating and the sound is hitting the sound board and reflecting from the walls. You have to tell the computer how to do those things.

And I'm pretty sure you could get Billy Joel, Elton John, Peter Nero, Ferrante and Teicher, Alicia Keys, Ray Charles, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck, etc, etc together to all play the same song on the exact same piano, and every one of them will sound differently.

Remember, MIDI basically only does the following things: it plays a note for a certain duration at a certain velocity (how hard you hit the note) which gets translated into the volume. There is also natural note decay to consider with the other things I've mentioned.

So let us know which piano products you have already considered and discarded and maybe we can help with whatever is left, or just realize that your hearing may be more sensitive than you yourself believe. Also, let us know what kind of music are you trying to re-create.

John

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