Well for pretty much my entire year of Pico ownership I have been going on about this sort of thing. Clearly the initial emphasis was on playing live and using the built in instruments or plugins, with full control of the latter evolving gradually. Things have been much more limited for those that want to use it in all sorts of clever ways with a DAW, or wire eigenharp signals into instruments etc in highly customised ways. Its frustrating at times but understandable given evolving ideas about things like workbench, and quite how many other fronts the software has needed to evolve on.
Im sure we'll get what we need eventually, whether it be via workbench & some future agents that will send interesting stuff out via OSC, or via opensource initiatives. OSC is rather a broad thing so there is probably some potential to be talking at cross-purposes about this stuff. Eigenlabs may well need to add stuff to OSC in order for it to do all they need for internal signalling & message routing. And because OSC is far more flexible and not so tightly defined in terms of what messages can be sent with it, if Eigenlabs are trying to work with instrument partners to have stuf 'just work' at some future point, then there is a need to come up with standard spec for what messages are sent over OSC to be used in a general musical context and offer a more powerful equivalent to midi. But many of these complications are not relevant to people that just want to hack around now, for example using OSC data from eigen keys with max or reaktor, where we dont really care what the OSC messages are, only that they are available to us at all. So thats why I think we could end up talking at cross-purposes when it comes to OSC or being frustrated with the pace of change. Yes if there had been more focus on the DIY aspects from day one, as with something like the monome project for xample, then some of us would have been able to do some more flexible & innovate things in this first year, but other sorts of users may of had a less enjoyable time of it, and obviously Eigenlabs have all sorts of other factors to take into account. Its very hard to meet all users expectations because expectations can be very broad and what one person things is a must-have essential may have no relevance to someone else, this was apparent with a product such as NI's Maschine which didnt do quite a lot of what many people expected when first released, and NI have been playing catchup via software updates since.
Anyway Stage is not the big missing piece of the jigsaw for me personally, didnt expect it to be, but it does show me that things are going in the right direction. And Im sure it does solve some realtime config issues which likely affect a broader range of users than, for example, those of us waiting for OSC out.
UK
