I'm glad those messages are coming across. Music is queen, tools are secondary - at least to me.
A lot of YouTube composers or other loud voices in the spotlight create this false idea that all professionals jump on new libraries and plugins the day they are released. That's absolutely not the case. These guys are pretty much full-time reviewers with a Patreon account attached, and paid courses, and MIDI packs, and whatnot - this is one of their main income streams, they're trying to sell you stuff and get more views. However, if you're a full-time composer for film, TV, and games, and that's your main income, it would be a terrible business investment to just blindly buy everything when you already have several terrabytes of stuff that works. You'd also normally wait until you really need something, and then bill the production for it instead of investing your business savings into it. And if you already have 5 string libraries and couldn't make them work, chances are that new shiny thing isn't going to solve your problems either.
Aside from that, most professional composers will wait for the first update of anything (not just libraries) to come out before even making the jump. That way the rest of the user base can find all the bugs and mistakes first, and the developer has time to fix that in an update. Full-time composers can't deal with that on tight deadlines, it's too disruptive. On top of that, most professional studios have multiple rigs that need to sync and be identical at all times so installing a new tool is not something you can quickly do, especially not in the middle of a project (which is always at busy studios). A lot of studios will only do a proper overhaul once a year, usually over Christmas or during a summer break. You'd be surprised by the tools some people still work with - some of which were released 10 years ago. If something works, it simply works, no need to change it. A newer tool is not automatically a better tool. The sample graveyards on all of our hard drives prove that quite well.
As far as blending goes, that was kind of a tongue-in-cheek comment since it's so passionately discussed. Yet few professional composers have this on their minds all that much. You can get 90% to the finish line by doing proper volume balancing. The rest can come from turning off the patch reverb and sending everything to the same reverb in the DAW, using a global EQ to filter out any frequency buildups, and then tape saturation and some parallel compression to glue it together. That can all be set up in a template so once that's done, it's not ever an issue anymore until a new library is added (which as discussed doesn't happen every week). The outliers are Spitfire and VSL, maybe also EastWest, because they are either very wet or very dry. AIR is generally hard to blend. It doesn't play well with others, even when I record there live and then try to blend it with the mockup. One way I've managed to fix this is by shortening the releases to be similar to a "studio" release and less "church-y". That way it blends better with the studio recordings. But as you may have gathered from my videos, I prefer other libraries that were recorded at studios anyway. VSL isn't used all that much but you can do some reverb/delay/panning/EQ magic on that one to combat the dryness. But this is the reason why it's not used quite as much - it requires a lot of setup as opposed to other libraries. This is referring to the old dry VSL, I believe they also now have newer stuff recorded at Synchron which is obviously a pristine sounding studio.
All of these opinions really stem from multiple factors - having worked at a variety of studios, having worked in sampling for a while, having my own studio now and being a full-time composer... but above all, I've been incredibly poor here in LA. I've worked on blockbuster productions and network TV shows while barely getting by. I didn't have any shiny tools and was lacking very basic stuff, and certainly couldn't afford the latest of the latest - but I still worked on these productions and still delivered the desired quality. Just know your tools and you'll be fine. You can be a professional without all this nonsense, it's okay, don't sweat it. It'll come with the next bigger paycheck and until then you work with what you got.
