That's a pretty good summation of why we wrote something from scratch, very well observed. To add to it and clarify from the Eigenlabs point of view;
*We made the decision to develop EigenD in 2004/2005 - Max was not even remotely capable of supporting what the Eigenharp does then and there was no indication it would be able to. If there had I been would have been on a plane to California instead of kicking off a difficult and expensive software project. I'm not stupid and I hate the 'not invented here' syndrome. I have paid heavily enough in the past for it and watch for it assiduously. This has not been and is still not one of those moments.
*There do exist Open Source variants on Max, but Max isn't one of them. Open source is the only guarantee that the instrument might still be usable, viable and still developed in 50 years. I am personally passionate about this and the idea that any component of what makes it playable would be unusable because some third party died and took the rights to code with them is and will continue to be unacceptable. You will note that we even chose an open source cross platform framework (JUCE) for our GUI tools with a view that over time they might be viable in that sphere in the future.
*Max is expensive and for Pico owners would raise the cost of ownership to an unacceptable level. This is not that complicated an equation. If we make a cheaper Eigenharp in the future this picture just gets more stark.
*I'm seriously unconvinced that you can do what EigenD does in Max. Happy to be proved wrong, go for it, but having spent some time coding in EigenD for the first time this year, I've realised that it's a hard world dealing with that amount of data, in real time and making audio from it. And Max, as far as I'm aware, has never handled anything like that. And yes, you can decimate the data so it can cope, but that's really not the point - the reason we create that amount of data has a serious purpose and throwing it away just to run some piece of software that costs a load of money and doesn't give you anything spectacular in return is pretty stupid.
* And lastly, Max is old. Lots of the stuff in it is MIDI centric, and that is simply not where we're headed. It's a lot more mature than EigenD for sure, but it's formed from a different set of objectives than the ones we have and meets a different set of needs. We have a different vision of the future, one revolving around highly expressive performance rather than offline composition, academic musical pursuits and twiddling with noise. Those things are interesting in their own right, just not to me and as I have found over the last two years, not to the vast majority of Eigenharp players either.
We have invited other developers to share in that journey towards a seriously expressive electronic future, and a proprietary development environment that might disappear sometime at the whim of others does not figure strongly on that road right now. I'm very happy to see someone interfacing the Eigenharp to Max in some way, I'm sure there could be some interesting things come from it. However, we have near zero customer interest in such a thing, so it's not something that we can give any bandwidth to at the moment.
cheers
John
PS; to add to NothanUmber's OSC comment - we have substantial plans with OSC and any volunteers to help us with that would be greatly appreciated. A test OSC input would be a great little project...