I think it's all going the way you are suggesting, the Tracks view is where a lot of improvements will take place including editable chord track, vol, pan etc... automation, direct midi clip edit.
With more tracks it would be using more RAM, if they can get the compressed source media to play direct would help, being able to attach compressed files to the SGU without converting them to wav. I made up House-of-The-Rising-Sun-SGU.zip with wma attached but as soon as you open it they convert to wav.
Is the bbw2 in RealBand using the quicker CPU utilization generate method now ?