Actually, that's a lot closer than the starting rack! Another fairly complex filter would be a good idea, plus I'd just go ahead and swap the Mangroves with another Plaits, given what it is (Olivier's PERFECTED Braids...yeaaahhh!!!). Not bad, now...if you slapped this into a Rackbrute and then strapped that to a Minibrute 2s, that would be a king-hell impressive small rig. And the fact that that sort of solution isn't all that spendy...well...

As for the Moog 55...ahhh, it LOOKS impressive. But the sad fact is that, compared to even modern-day MU-format systems (and certainly Eurorack), the shortcomings become really apparent really fast! For starters, there's the old and awful S-trigger system, which Moog Music STILL insists on using in its modular reproduction systems. Bob had this idea to use a logical hi-state (+5v) to indicate 'off', and a drop below a certain threshold on down to 0v as 'on'. if there's only one or two devices in this arrangement, it's workable. But there's a certain point, which varied for each module and certainly for each system, where connecting too many S-trig bus connections leads to a voltage sag...and then your bus would send a spurious 'on', often when doing so would drive you up the wall! This is, in fact, why we use buffered mults these days when voltage levels are critical across numerous connections, such as in VCO CVs which need to be stable to maintain tuning. But Bob didn't consider adding any sort of regeneration for the S-trig bus, so...well, you get the idea. And that's just ONE issue among several annoying ones. Honestly, these days, we have it easy; many older modular systems contained idiosyncracies that often amounted to 'boobytraps', since the whole concept of what a synthesizer should/could be was being worked out in tandem with the process of 'what's a synthesizer in the first place?' Mistakes got made...and got entrenched!