I'm really enjoying both the sounds and the functionality of Brenso, but one should note that while the coarse tune and main modulation knobs are large and well-spaced, the attenuverters are small, and there are some very small switches for occasional use. Having all those attenuverters is really handy, though, and the layout and normalling is quite well thought-out.
Roses are red
Clichés are chronic
Chipz, Rings, and Clouds can be heterophonic
Sorry, it's a few months early...
I don't find Falistri overcomplicated and cluttered. I chose it over Maths because it seemed more straightforward to me (plus I liked the aesthetics better, a small bonus). The Frap modules have a lot of modulation options with attenuverters, which really helps. Falistri has both bipolar and unipolar outputs. Shape does not affect cycle time, which is important when using it as an oscillator. It tracks V/oct really well. Maths can do some things that Falistri cannot, and vice-versa. I'm pretty happy with it so far.
Of the modules mentioned, I have A-145-4, Quad VCA, 3xMIA, Pam's, and the Out v3, and like them all. One nice feature of the Out is the cue input, which lets you audition sounds being constructed without repatching. I also have 3xVCA, and should have considered Veils as a Quad VCA alternative. As a Maths alternative, I was considering the Cosmotronic Delta-V (which is small) before I went with Falistri. I really like Falistri, but I wanted more than two envelopes, and to be able to use it as one or two oscillators. So I added Quadrax, which is packed with functionality. You are tight on space, so some careful planning is needed, and then availability will be an issue...
I'm going to mention (because they haven't been already) the one filter I started with (Bastl Ikarie, dual stereo), and the one I just ordered (WMD C4rbn, multimode mono with wavefolding).
If you truly don't care about the aesthetic factor at all, why not just use Max8 and VCV and a DAW?
That is not just about aesthetics: it's a very different way of working. But the look of the front panel of a module (assuming that the labelling is clear) does not affect how one uses it. That said, I share some of @eexee's concerns. The Dreadbox modules look a little garish to me. An example of a module that I will not consider solely based on the aesthetics is the recent Cre8audio / Pittsburgh Modular collab called Capt'n Big-O. Terrible name, terrible look. Even though I was contemplating an SV-1b earlier (a submodular thought phase before going full Eurorack), I will not buy this module, no matter how good it sounds. Is that irrational? Perhaps. But a lot of what we claim as rational behaviour is thin justification over an irrational core. Some of my recent acquisitions were swayed by aesthetics, and my current rack looks pretty good. I think it also sounds good, but am I kidding myself? Hard to say, really.
Meanwhile today in a private sale posted by USPS "click-n-ship", the package arrived before noon on the second day after posting, a day ahead of their original estimate.
Hopefully their corporate practices are entirely different in Australia. It's ground shipping in the US plus the "last mile" that we're all moaning about. Perfect Circuit at least has good tracking information. Two of my shipments from them have gone through the Navajo Nation, which is at least interesting.
Detroit Modular ships USPS to me in NYC. Despite recent attempts to destroy and privatize it, it remains fast and reliable, much more so than the "free" shipping done by the private carriers. I wish more suppliers offered this option.
FedEx is the worst (UPS close behind). They lie about delivery times, they don't provide notifications as requested half the time, they don't honour the signature requirement. I pretty much have to spend two days sitting within sight of the front window to spot them. (Packages have been known to disappear in my nabe.)
I understand the appeal of WYSIWYG, and in fact I was comfortable with Word 5.0 on a Mac, before they stuffed it full of features without regard to the overall design. It is a bit disappointing that there are no really good modern solutions (TeX was created in the early '80s). I think Markdown and its derivatives are a small step away from WYSIWYG that is acceptable to most people. Using underscores to delimit italics, asterisks to delimit bold, etc. You can go a long way with that, and there are various translators and pre/post-processors. I wish I didn't have to fear everything breaking when an OS upgrade is released, but that is modern life, I guess.
The one module you have reviewed that I own and use is the Xaoc Warna II. The manufacturer's user manual is two pages long. Your report is 68 pages. It simply doesn't merit that much space. The useful information is swamped in boilerplate. I won't say that there are useless parts but I think there are a lot of parts that only a very few people will ever bother with. The trick is to stagger or structure the flow of information so that the reader can bail or dive as they see fit, and get what they came for without too much surplus. Not easy. The fact that you yourself are splitting things up is telling. Please try to see how your readers can benefit from that also.
I'm afraid that my own solutions won't be of much use to you, but I will describe them briefly. For technical papers, the standard in my field is the open-source program TeX/LaTeX. It is not "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) like Word; rather, a LaTeX document is plain text where formatting code is interspersed with content, and the document is then rendered to PDF. There are apps which facilitate this or even render incrementally so you can regain some of the WYSIWYG benefits. It is the standard because it can be used relatively quickly at a high level, if one is banging out a letter, but offers complete control down to a very low level if you want (computer scientists love this) and because its handling of mathematics is unbeatable.
But I also use straight LaTeX only under duress, and prefer these days to work at a higher level, using Scribble, the documentation language for an open-source programming language called Racket (a dialect of Scheme, or LISP). Scribble is built on top of Racket and so has elegant ways to handle much automation. It renders not only to PDF (through LaTeX) but to HTML for webpages. So I use it to build course Web pages, and all associated documents, including course notes and proto-textbooks. If you are curious, and do a Web search on my handle, you will find my university home page with links to my materials.
As I said above, I use Word only under duress, and certainly not for documents of the length and complexity you are creating. I can well believe that there are limits on how appendices can be structured, under the design criterion that they tend to be simpler and more focussed in nature than the main body of the document. This, to me, is further incentive to split the technical appendices out into a separate document.
A few suggestions for possible reorganization. You don't have to have everything in one massive document. You can have a short summary, a longer report, and technical appendices in separate documents. You can have a paragraph or two on the Web site to motivate the reader, or maintain all the short summaries of all modules in one document with version numbers and a changelog. You can take all the meta-information (explaining what the purpose is of each section and subsection) out into a "Overview of Report Structure" document so it appears only in one place. You can cross-reference all these with clickable links in the PDF. I don't work with MS Word unless forced to do so, but I'm sure it can handle appendices without giving them chapter numbers. Just a few suggestions. This is obviously a labour of love for you, so do what you think is best for your readers.
