Hi MDT,
I have to agree, it is very strange that there aren't more intermediate level control consoles between the Korg NanoKontrol and much larger Digidesign-style ones. On a side note, is the NanoKontrol suitable for VSL work, in your opinion? Are the faders high enough resolution?
I spent a lot of time a year or so ago looking at getting the perfect controller. I had an M-Audio MidAir-25 (basically an Oxygen-25) which had eight rotary encoders on it, a slider and a modwheel. I still use it for inputting keyswitches, but I found that the other controls weren't really suitable. The encoders were too hard to control to a high degree of accuracy, and the modwheel was jumpy.
I also bought a VMeter for around £50, which is a 4" ribbon controller. It looked great in all its promotional material, but the end product isn't as useful as I'd hoped. The idea is that your DAW can feed back to LEDs on the VMeter, effectively creating a monitoring level display alongside a fader. The reality is that it isn't fully compatible with many DAWs. Also its pressure sensor is less about finger pressure and more about finger surface area, which is slightly harder to control precisely.
Perhaps I'm not the best person to listen to, because I'm only really working on the one project of my album, and so accuracy to me is far more important than speed, but I have to agree with what someone on here ultimately told me: You're going to end up redrawing controller curves on your DAW anyway to finetune and repair them, so it's actually quicker and easier to draw them on in the first place. So I've never even tried the VMeter for velocity crossfade, I just draw everything into the three controller lanes below the MIDI track. Perhaps that will become inefficient when I move onto other projects that require swifter workflows, but for now that seems to be the best option.
One other option did occur to me - people on here talk about breath controllers as the most intuitive way to input velocity crossfade information, and that does make sense. Given how hard they can be to get hold of, I wondered about something more like a theremin, where you could wave your hands in the air above it and 'conduct' your virtual orchestra in real time, at least in terms of velocity crossfading. MIDI-capable theremins, however, are either kit-built and somewhat suspect, or very expensive, so I went off the idea. Then I saw the LeapMotion. If the idea sounds interesting to you, I'd highly recommend checking the LeapMotion out. Cheap and potentially ideal.