I'd like to see this hit 40, and this is entertaining to me. So:
Pirate Radio to me means "thrown together by individuals operating outside a regulatory authority".
Applied to sampling? It's hard to parse. It's kind of like saying that small developers are like criminals and so are their users, if one is to take the sense of pirate radio as applied to Radio Luxembourg in the sixties, because of the usage being beyond regulations. So it's like he is saying we all have been doing it wrong so far. I'd wondered if it meant that we would pay a fee to the BBC Orchestra every time we used the library commercially - which is certainly a great way to share profits with the musicians that we would have nothing without, and without precedent on this scale. There was a time when if you used some sound libraries - loop-based ones - you would have to credit the creators. That came and went - though it was fair, most users just didn't feel like doing it. But would they object to a very inexpensive entrance to a library that only cost when you were going to make money with it?
The other sense of Pirate Radio I think he might be using is simply that people have been making libraries without standards, and perhaps Spitfire wants to impose some. Beyond UACC, which isn't universal.
I'd really like it if they make an attempt to go the way that SampleModeling and AudioModeling have gone with controllability - and as cpaf says, making use of synthesis for state transitions would be great - if done well - but it seems like RAM is cheap compared to CPU power, so that might not be much of a market motivator - and honestly, given the marketplace and how so many people would rather play a recording of an instrument that sounds kind of emotive than make the instrument actually do that, I would have my doubts. Happy to be wrong about it, though. But that doesn't seem to have anything to do with Pirate Radio.
I need a new library for strings very shortly, and what Spitfire have been putting out isn't quite getting it for me. I like a lot of the detailed character and vitality of the Orchestral Tools things, and really love their idea (upcoming) of being able to make mixes of all the room mics and then render those as a single stereo custom-mix mic position, saving system resources. So that would be a great feature. And I'd really like a dry, forward perspective available, more than what's available. These are things I'm hoping for. If not now then soon.