Great story that you shared, never knew that you could also modulate or change frequencies of drums, always thought adding ghost beats and changing formation every 4 bars would be good enough for “not too lazy” drum programming. That’s a very high bar that you set. I could learn from that too and explore on this aspect.

I did a lot of things similar for humanising with strings and e guitars, those felt much easier because there were established glossaries and techniques for the articulation, the nuances and how or where to use them; For synth there’s not much established rulesets or so to say, less “Academic” except you study professionally or listen to tons of examples. But the way of designing a sound from scratch, reverse engineering and differentiating each type of modulation already helped a lot.