This is an amazing list. I will +1 Dexed cos FM is great, and add a few more music production apps to the list.
BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - A great all-in-one orchestral vst with decent samples. Great for people wanting to bridge the gap between writing with sections and writing for specific instruments. Lacks articulations like Legato and Marcato, but is ridiculously good for the price of jack shit
SPAN - An excellent mixing and mastering vst that gives you a highly configurable fft spectrum analyzer, with a few presets for translation checks. My favorite feature is the correlation meter, which helps me visually check interference in stereo mixes
Kontakt free library - Has some solid samples for a selection of instruments, but I mostly use the Jazz Guitar and Bass Guitar from here for basic sketching
Equalizer APO - System wide EQ. Extremely configurable. I’ve since hopped over to SoundID Reference, but prior to that, I was using this. It’s great for making all your headphones and speakers sound like any other pair of headphones, and there’s a huge library of headphone presets that tell you how to get a neutral signature on just about any pair of them
5.1 and 7.1 systems aren’t all that widespread, even in the music industry. Surround kinda sits in the same place vr does for me. It’s immensely cool, but it’ll never become standard due to hassle and lack of support.
Most of the recent innovation in sound has been trickled down from the music and film industries. Just a general increase in the capabilities of soft synths and a better understanding of foley, alongside dedicated in house recording studios have raised the bar of audio.
To be honest I agree with you that sound is overlooked, sound engineers truly are unsung heroes. I mean even when people point out the sound in a game, it’s usually directed at the composer.