Can anyone with practical experience with this tool share their opinion?
The plugins I work on tend to look more like software than any piece of hardware. I still use knobs because they are more efficient use of screen real estate. When you click / drag them, left is decrease, right is increase. You don't need to drag around like a physical knob.
Here is one set of plugins I did: https://www.tracktion.com/products/daw-essentials-collection
I mean, it is a bit of a cop-out, and you can't go "skeu is the sux" and then .. just use it.
My question to you, then, is: how would you re-do the knob? It is a uniquely viable control; but lets say you -had- to get rid of it. What, then?
They use numeric text boxes which also pop a slider when given focus.
You can also let the users drag the textbox left and right directly (with some visual cue), thus achieving the same functionality as the current implementation, but still without getting in the way of someone who just prefers to use the textbox normally.
Or if I want to automate a gradual knob change over time as the song plays, I can either record myself "scrolling" the knob or draw the change into an automation track (and again, can set precise values for knob values at precise times if I want to).
But of course, professionals own hardware that they connect to the DAW, which renders most of that stuff irrelevant.
If designers from this world got ahold of the music scene from that world plugins would get considerably worse, as UI's would be the focus of intense simplification, leaving complex features and their power users by the wayside.
I, for example, am a nobody (a hobbyist musician) who dislikes most custom VST UIs. Back in the day, FL Studio (nee Fruityloops) shipped with a bunch of plugins that looked like they had an autogenerated UI, with every parameter getting its own controls (a knob, numeric readout, and visual bar)... and I liked them. No cruft, and it was easy to systematically manipulate each control to determine its effect on the sound.
There's also the unintended side effect that now I know how to operate studio recording equipment because skeumorphic UI taught me how so many of these things work.
There are applications out there which use angular drag/mouse information when grabbing knobs, but they are the tiny minority (and as you can guess there's all sorts of issues doing so).
The skeumorphic UI lets you move between the physical panel and the GUI pretty seamlessly. Not saying there isn't a better option, but this at least is pretty nice for beginners.