HI David,
I have struggled with strings for years. I own GPO, Some VSL and EW platinum Halion Strings and a few other bits and pieces. I agree with Larry, and I have never got good results.
The problem seems to lie (for my ears) in the versatility and the homogenity (is that a word?) of strings, plus the mass of articulations they are capable of.
Most strings packages (excluding VSL which costs a fortune) go through only a small subset of articulations and frankly they are not enough.

Even a comparitively simply sound like a staccato, in the real world, comes in so many shapes and forms - aurally, there are long staccatos, short ones, heavy attack, light attack etc. In a single (real) staccato line, a number of different sounding stacatto's are employed, depennding on the contour and dynamics of the melody. A lot of this is instictively handled in an orchestra.

There are around fifty different articulations that can be notated for in a string score, and the same caveats apply to each articulation.

Even if you have such an arsenal of sounds, how do you employ them in your standard sequencer?

The worst thing is that in a given melodic line, you might need different articulation sets. To achieve that in your bog standard sequencer, you need to have several tracks going on in tandem- for one melody line - very messy. The only sequencer I know that can use different sample sets on a single track is Cubase, and even this is involved set up. There may be others.

Even so if you want to go ahead, have you thought about HollyWood Strings from EWQL? I bleive the EW products are the best below VSL, they often do half price deals and the Play software gives you quite a bit of manoeverabily.

Zero

Win 11 64, Asus Rog Strix z390 mobo, 64 gig RAM, 8700k