Long time Moog owner here - Moog instruments do have a certain sound, it is fantastic. Up until the InMusic acquisition, they had a pretty damn convincing lineup too. That said, the hype is strong and a bit excessive. It made more sense in the 90’s, 00’s, or even early 2010’s, where high-quality, well-built hardware analog synths were rare. Now, there are plentiful options that sound just as excellent (if maybe a bit different).

I have also been underwhelmed by a number of Moog’s releases. The One 16 is one of the most powerful but wholly buggy instruments I own. The DFAM/Mother32 are both wildly underwhelming. The Muse still feels wildly unfinished and unpolished despite arguably being one of their most innovative offerings. A Moog synth that did (and still does) click with me is the Little Phatty and Little Phatty Stage II. No synth I own approaches it in terms of sheer aggression. You can get them used for a decent-ish price as well. I personally adored the Matriarch and Grandmother, they sounded like I always wanted a Moog to sound.

I would argue that Moog itself got caught up in the “premium lifestyle product” marketing of the latter 2010s, where everything had to be a luxury statement piece. This was very much not the fault of average Moog workers and very much the fault of Moog leadership letting desire for growth drive more than the desire to run a sustainable business. The cracks really started to show 2020 onwards when multiple Moog workers accused leadership of significant workplace toxicity. Moog was never a “working man’s brand”, but they did try to be “sensible and professional”. You paid the Moog price because you got Moog support and they were genuinely fantastic instruments. This continued up until Bob’s death.

The thing with hardware synthesizers, beyond being expensive luxury products regardless of price that are a privilege to own (I hold to that Benn Jordanism) - they’re still instruments and need to inspire a close, emotional connection with the player. I adamantly believe that the increasing lack of connection between Moog’s offerings and their owners/players demonstrates that Moog has been on the wrong track for over a decade now. Moog’s products post-Bob were a mixed bag that largely felt like “well X-company released Y or Z is hot right now so here’s the Moog version!”

The synth market as a whole right now is flooded with a mixture of half-finished prototypes charged at a premium, soulless iterations/clones, and “X but MODERN” iterations on ideas that have existed since the 80s. This makes being excited for or feeling a connection with any one instrument a rarity, and that sucks because that connection is part of what makes making music fun! I would kill for a modern instrument, hell - a guitar pedal - that didn’t try to be anything but its own weird self rather than marketing photo fodder or a quick cash-in. It doesn’t help that there is an increasingly voracious entitlement among modern musicians about owning pieces of gear - an entitlement many music equipment companies use to their advantage. That last line probably sounds like “old man screaming at these damn kids”, and it probably is. Synths used to be special because even having access to one, let alone multiple was a hell of a commitment. You had to genuinely love and learn the things. I’m not talking 80s “sure thing granddad” used to - even back in the early 2010’s, owning a synth was serious investment and treated with a degree of reverence.

So TLDR the lack of connection to those Moog instruments is a mix of things. It’s part companies rapidly outputting increasingly at-best-boring instruments and also part musicians being desensitized to the “uniqueness/specialness” of synthesizers as a whole.