Lupine, thanks so much for your reply in the original thread. I'm very grateful for what you said and how you said it - you've helped to prove a valuable point, as I explain below.
My apologies to all: my original post on this topic was deliberately misleading (though not incorrect).
The articulation 'feature' shown in my pic in the original thread has been possible in Logic for a long time - but it uses (... cue horror music ...) the Environment!
See my dastardly plot now? If I'd declared that up front, how many Logic users would have instantly gone something like, "yeah but, ew, no, don't wanna go anywhere near the Environment"? A very big proportion, I'd guess.
The Environment is seriously neglected and I really want to change that; it could help so many users in so many ways, and I believe it will be essential as users go forward with AU3 and start looking to build very large templates.
The beauty of the Environment is that you can use little bits and pieces of it without having to know and understand everything about all of it, and it's actually pretty friendly, flexible and forgiving. Please don't let the wannabe 'gurus' put you off (you know the type: those often-covert narcissists who just have to get in the way of anything you try to do off your own bat). I've known the Environment well for many years and I'm certain it wasn't designed for experts only.
Anyway, back to the 'feature'.
What's one of the biggest dissatifactions in using articulation keyswitches in Logic? Isn't it the ABSENCE OF CONVENIENT VISIBILITY of the assignments of keyswitches to articulations? Who's going to remember all the keyswitch mappings for all their libraries? And who's happy about having to go back and forth between library sample player windows and the DAW note editor just to get reminders of the mappings? Certainly not me, for one.
So I used an easy peasy solution in the Environment to improve the situation. You can too. If Apple introduced a new feature sort of along these lines but without involving the Environment, I'd be as surprised and happy as Lupine was. (I'm really sorry about the deception, Lupine; however, you helped in a big way by expressing your reaction to the feature without the issue of the Environment clouding judgment - which was exactly what I was hoping for; thanks again.)
This feature is very simple to construct. It uses Logic's traditional single-channel Mapped Instruments cabled in the Environment to Software Instruments. This Mapped MIDI Instrument isn't compatible with Logic's Articulation Sets (but the Standard MIDI Instrument is), so for each instrument MIDI track the choice has to be made between fully visible keyswitched articulation versus less-conveniently visible Articulation Sets.
For the vast majority of cases I prefer the full and very convenient visibility provided by using Mapped MIDI Instruments. Articulation labels are written into each Mapped Instrument's Input Name field in its definition window (opened by double-clicking the Mapped Instrument), and it's also possible to remap the Output Note for each MIDI Input note number, which can add a lot of flexibility and convenience to the user's mappings without having to touch the sample player's mapping.
And now back to the future.
Cabling MIDI Instruments to Software Instruments in the Environment is currently the only sensible, practical way forward for constructing very large VEP7 AU3 templates. It's ironic that this most basic and traditional Environment technique still hasn't been surpassed by Logic's more recent and supposedly more convenient facilities.
There are however a couple of important caveats:-
(1) Unlike Articulation Sets, this method doesn't enjoy the convenience of being able to select and load previously saved mappings, and so later template modifications may not be as easy as with Articulation Sets.
(2) This method, in its simplest form, may not be able to solve all visibility problems in all sample libraries. For example, in Syz Dimension Strings there are altogether 40 preset Types of articulation, which makes mapping keyswitch notes into the full list of MIDI Notes less than ideal. There are certain ways around this by using the Environment further, some of which I'm already using; but I'd rather not describe those here and now.