Bob (jazzmammal), judging from your last post, I suspect you just never had a good GM synth.

Only one acoustic guitar?

The General MIDI bank on my SD90 has 16 different acoustic guitars for patch 26

It also has 16 different acoustic guitars for patch 25.

Clean Electric? 16 different electrics on patch 26 including Tele, Strat, 335 and others.

GM patch 27 provides 4 jazz guitars and 4 pedal steels including a Hawaiian

16 different muted guitars (GM patch 30)

12 different distorted guitars (patch 31)

and 8 different harmonics or feedback patches (#32)

All GM patch numbers and it's easy to get to the alternate sounds. You can either twist the knob on the sound module or assign MSB and LSB numbers in the patch assignment dialog box in your sequencer.

So not all GM synths give you one sound per patch number. Like all things synth, it depends on the synth you use.

And as I said before, a couple of nice things about hardware synths are

(1) you can use 16 or 32 at a time without causing any problems with your CPU maxing out

(2) since the sounds are stored in ROM instead of each note being created by the CPU, in a good synth, the sounds can be much more complex

(3) since there is virtually no latency [about 5ms] you can mix and match as many synths as you want, picking the best sounds for the particular song

(4) when your computer OS upgrades or if you decide to switch platforms or even use them with a tablet, keyboard or other computer, they still work and will probably work for decades to come.

Insights and incites by Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

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