First, hi all. I'm new here and may be stupid about midi, so please bear with me, or insult me is okay, but, if one of you experts could graciously summarize the validity of my thoughts, that would be much appreciate, as I'm in a quandary. Here's the situation, as brief as possible.

I compose music, am all about getting it on paper, and I'm mystified about all the midi complexity, the conversations about attack this, velocity or decay that, on and on. This is with getting realistic midi playback in mind. So, let's take an acoustic piano.

In a score, you have notes, a time signature, dynamics, phrasing and pedal markings, etc. But limited etc. From a score, a pianist sits down and plays what's on paper, which doesn't involve fifty parameters for every staff: you hit the notes at a certain speed, at varying volumes, some phrasing and pedal. I have all that in a score, export it to midi, load it up and, the best free tools I've found (I'm not going to invest in anything that won't play a realistic piano), it always comes down to sounding, in part, like a toy piano, best I've found like a toy with some notes in the mid to upper registers, most of the keys sounding alright, but not all: it's like somebody inserted a Casio electric piano for some keys on an acoustic grand, so-called, anyway. And the demo of a few products that brag a lot sounds great, but I know I turned every little knob every which way and nothing quite that good! Sometimes, of course, the demo is in registers more friendly to realistic sound for the instruments. I don't trust online product demos, as some engineer at the company could have tweaked it out the wazoo for a week, for all I know, which I don't want to have to do. I do trust the very expensive products, like East West, deliver, but I'm not a millionaire and would be content with almost fooling somebody: just not, at best, a toy piano some notes, or a piano that, is if, is rattling in a cave, or sounding like the instrument is covered with a big cardboard box, when things get pianissimo.

That's the situation. Now we have Garritan and Miroslav that are affordable, but do even these get past the toy piano? Most important, is there a product, at all, that just plays your score, created in Finale or Sibelius, good notation programs? I have to believe, please correct me if I'm wrong, my notation products can export notes' exactly notated durations at their tempos, dynamics, phrasing and the pedal. A performer doesn't have to bend a velocity curve or twang up or down the reverb, confabulate the equalized echo or pan what comes from each hand (sorry for the tongue-in-cheek, but I seriously don't know what I'm talking about, turn DAW knobs like a monkey, hoping one of them delivers something different, most of them just making things worse, and I did admit to being stupid, so have some pity...).

Bottom line. Is there a product that will play a very explicit piano score, without having to turn those annoying little knobs for a week and still have it sound like some of the strings are broken and laying on adjacent? Anything out of the box that sounds civilized and works, without an act of Congress, for retards like me? Is it you just get what you pay for, and, if so, pay for what product that works, as such, then, short of thousands going to East West? Or do you simply have to spend half your time tweaking knobs, instead of scoring, which is just a frustrating time pit, to my mind?

Thank you very much, sincerely, for any advice.