Okay, latency is one issue you mentioned. What are the others?
Stability with hundreds and hundreds of tracks.
I'm recording this summer with a big orchestra and choir in London. The last thing anyone wants is to start having to fiddle with shutting tracks down or freezing or something with 80-100 players sitting there waiting, just because you want to do one more take (or overdub) and suddenly your recording software runs out of headroom.
There are multiple room mics, gallery mics, spot mics on all the sections; I don't even ask how many simultaneous tracks are going when we do that, since there's an engineer and a separate PT operator. They used to link two PT rigs when it was HD, but I would think with HDX they wouldn't have to anymore.
I've yet to have latency issues on my 2007 Mac Pro 1,1 running Logic natively while recording 16 simultaneous tracks.
Congrats. But what you, or I, or any composer might accept regarding latency may be different from what studio players think is acceptable.
Look -- I'm not trying to
sell anyone on PT. I need it to do what I do but if I didn't -- why bother?
Studios, more than ever, have to run like a business. They can't afford to stick their heads in the sand and "just do it that way because we always have." Put another way, if they could save $50-100k on PT gear by using something else, they would, provided that they aren't left stuck when the orchestra costs $10k an hour (or more) because they decided to try something unproven. Because that would be the last time anyone wanted to record at that location.
The day another company can match the performance / reliability of PT will be a tough one for Avid, I would think.