I could also consider using a slew limiter, it's true that I don't always like the sudden changes from the MD. I have read and watched videos about slew limiters but to be perfectly honest, it sort of flew over my head a bit as I had no hands-on experience. Are you referring to Function ? It's a bit big for just one channel, I feel, I'd prefer something smaller. Funny, when looking for slew limiters on here, one finds Stages but I don't think it could do what I need, am I wrong ?
I've been playing with how I feed gates to the MD, the most fun so far has been feeding several euclidean patterns from the Pamela to the N, X and Y inputs of the MD. Crazy sequences, totally worth sacrificing a few outputs of the Pam just for that ! I use it mainly for sequencing parameters on the BIA but I guess I could spare one output to play with the Disting or the Pico DSP. I found the reverb tails of those to be somewhat lacking for my use, compared to the 2hp which can sound huge.
I hear you with regards to the redundancy with Plaits, although I want to use that one for sounds with an envelope, I like the sound of the internal LPG. Nevertheless, I think both Plaits and the Black Wavetable are on the "mellow" side of sound sources, which is why the idea of another sound source to replace it sounds appealing. What you wrote about Noise Engineering, "a little harsh sounding sometimes", "strange harmonics", I have the impression that it's what I am looking for. For context, I have a track I didn't make on the modular (the computer I use to record stuff is broken right now) but which is representative of what I usually do and illustrates what sort of drones I'm interested in - sorry for the awful mixing work:
The plan is as you said, try harder with what I have first and explore all options I can think of before making any decision. Like that's going to be easy with my birthday and Black Friday coming up

--- Voltage control all the things ---