My personal take on "copying " is a bit different. Personally, I don't think anyone here is re-inventing the wheel in sonics/sound/noise spectrum. It's physics/electronics, under clear laws based on human ears.

Don't be so sure about that. There are modules that turn up on a somewhat-routine basis on MG that are gamechangers. Yes, music is a big physics experiment, but there's always going to be new methods with which to ply those physical laws.

This is actually a problem I ran into in my final academic stint at Illinois. The Experimental Music Studios, by the time I'd gotten there, had devolved into a highly-compartmentalized situation in which, if you were working with analog synthesis, you were expected to stay within analog synthesis. If you worked with any of the digital hardware, you were supposed to keep your business confined to those studios. There weren't any tie-lines between these studios, either; if you wanted to, say, run some of the Kyma (in Studio D) output through the Buchla (in Studio A)...well, not only was that made deliberately difficult, just suggesting it would elicit howls of protest from the powers that be at that time. I also ran into this at Tennessee, but it was far easier to circumvent the problem there, plus the professor who ran the studios there wasn't very savvy about what he was hearing in other peoples' work...so if you felt like dragging the Synthi AKS from Studio 1 to Studio 2 to process the Synclavier, you could get away with it.

But in my own studio, I've allowed all of the different methods to interplay. Back in Nashville, we never believed that you had to do things that way, because it stifles development. So as a result, my own studio starts with the early 1920s (albeit a bit updated: Moog Theremini) and goes to right-frickin'-NOW, and allows in every working paradigm in that span with zero operational barriers between them. And by putting all of these disparate methods side by side, a lot of new ideas do emerge. True, the same physics applies...but the endless combinations of possible results frequently suggests new ideas for that tired ol' wheel we're all so accustomed to.

Even just within the modular environment, you see this sort of thing going on. For example, there's no reason why you can't have some elaborate wavetable-scanning oscillator with the very latest tech feeding into replicas of Don's gates from the early 1960s. Hell, you can even buy them at the same store!

Now, every once in a while you DO see something that seriously warps the synth landscape. But the REAL re-inventions are coming from the insane combinatorial math going on when you have a 100% variable topology that consists of several thousand possible elements. And that's where Eurorack is at. Every time something gamechanging appears, the impact of that is so much greater than people suspect, because not only do you have that new thing, its presence has the ability to redefine literally dozens or even hundreds of other modules' functionalities.

So, sure...it's easy to replicate someone else's efforts, and even improve on them in the process. But why would you? Especially when you don't have to. When you open the door of possibilities that exists here, you're getting an opportunity to accomplish something different and potentially better...sort of the diametrical opposite of the academic studios I mentioned above, where everything's set up to trap composers in a given paradigm with little chance of escape. So, in such an open-ended working environment as Eurorack, why set your own traps?