At the risk of offending, I'm gonna jump in here with my $.02 because I've been mulling this point over for a quite a while now.

Up to about a year ago or so, I would have 110 percent agreed with OP, as well as many others who have expressed similar sentiments over the past handful of years I've owned BiaB and have often lurked, and at times participated in these forums.

As someone who had originally purchased BiaB for learning and practicing guitar and bass, I was perfectly content with the RTs and styles on tap. Yes, I felt like a lot of them were very dated and "vanilla," but that did not bother me much, as they were perfectly sufficient for my needs.

Then, about a couple of years ago I started developing much more of an interest in music production techniques, software and plugins. I started experimenting with all sorts of effects and MIDI VSTs and realized that every single thing you need to make 100 percent modern music and top hits with can be fully accomplished with RTs, RDs, MIDI tracks, and MIDI supertracks once you drag the raw materials into a full fledged DAW and apply FX, compression, and the myriad of techniques used nowadays in music production.

I cannot stress enough how much effects are already added to modern loops that are sold in the latest sample packs that give them that shiny sheen and movement which is entirely lacking from almost all BiaB tracks.

And this is a GOOD thing. Because you yourself can decide what, when, and how you apply your effects to various tracks.

I remember the first time I loaded W.A. Production's "The King" onto the Realdrums and bass realtrack in BiaB. I was absolutely FLOORED how much those tracks suddenly leapt to life with just a wee bit of tweaking! Then you have re-amping, gates, but-crushers, slicers, glitch FX and a million other things.

As an example, I'll just post a link to a track of mine that, IMO, sounds as modern as you like. Every single sound and note was derived from RTs and RDs with not a MIDI note in sight.

Now I'm not saying that I think the song is particularly good. As I said, I don't really user BiaB to produce songs, but I recorded this for one of the Xtra-style Pak contests way before I started delving into music production in general. Furthermore, I totally screwed up the gain staging, as well as a bunch of other mixing and mastering elements, but I'm fairly confident it sounds pretty damn contemporary nonetheless (and I'd be happy to hear what y'all think!).

The song: https://soundcloud.com/user-423212678/labor-day-pt-ii-1

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