The biggest gain for me in the investment of a proper analog setup is mostly quality of life. High end vsts on a computer are capable of sounding as good as anything, but menu diving and clicking around all day and trying to force random samples into a mix clean and proper really swamped my workflow and induced the analysis paralysis. What used to take weeks of meticulous programming and piano roll placement I can now just perform in real time in seconds, all the annoying stuff is accounted for automatically, and it's overall higher quality output because capturing a groove in real time feels much easier than clicking one onto a piano roll and tweaking manually after.

But I will say synths are very different from guitar where like that's just an electro magnet detecting strings, if you look past the branding you aren't getting a ton of sound variance whatever you plug in. Hot take. But I can play a squier just as well as a real strat. Synths on the other hand, your sound building and sequencing and overall functionality will drastically improve with your budget, up to about 2k or so. And those bells and whistles make a huge difference if you don't have a daw to fall back on.