This is fairly off-topic but I thought you were familiar alright! I used JUCE back in college for a POC synthesizer and I remember it being the absolute best for plugin development. Incredibly enough it was my first point of contact with C++ and it was a joy to develop with.

I have not revisited VSTs post LLMs or even stayed close to music since I lost my collection and rock climbing has consumed most of my last decade, but kudos to putting such unique tooling out there when the rest of the ecosystem looked so byzantine. It's wild how people built so many incredible virtual instruments back in the day.

Going through those memories I'm now curious how the scene is like today where wild idea projects are more within reach.