Re: new newb with an ear on native musical things...
I'm fairly new to the world of Komplete myself, having bought into the ecosystem with an M32 a few weeks ago, but hopefully I can clear some things up best as I can, mainly by trying to answer post 7 because you're asking the right questions
Komplete Kontrol itself is a piece of software that in comjunction with the komplete kontrol keyboards, lets you access various plugins from one place. This of course includes all of Native's own stuff like Kontakt, massive and so on, as well as third party plugins that choose to integrate with them. Komplete Kontrol itself appears as a VST instrument that you load into a track into your DAW, and it provides its own browser, accessible from the keyboard, that then lets you load up an instrument. And this is where the first big convenience factor comes in, because in addition to browsing your presets one synth at a time, you can choose to instead browse them by a sound category (IE you select that you're only interested in hard, distorted bases and Komplete will give you every such patch that you have from across all installed plugins). The other big reason why so many people are jumping on-board this bandwagon is that this preset browsing interface makes it possible to access presets of normally completely inaccessible plugins (IE xpand2) or ones that would normally require a lot of OCR or specialised scripts like Kontakt. In the case of Kontakt, any library can be added to this kontrol browser, for other plugins, they have to be NKS compatible to show up. And this is what the NKS standard means, that your plugin can be used within komplete, as well as providing parameter mappings for the knobs on the keyboard. Most of the time, NKS support is something done by the manufacturer of the plugin/library, but there are also people who add it in for other plugins, like freelance sound labs who have done it for the previously mentioned xpand as well as a ton of other synths.
Speaking of the parameters, this is the other big reason so many people get Komplete, because it makes adjusting them really easy. The keyboards have 8 touch sensitive knobs that let you adjust various parameters of a patch, which are further grouped into pages. So, for a sampled piano you might have 1 page for adjusting volumes of various microphones, the sounds of the keys and pedals, a separate page for modifying the attack and decay of the samples and a further one for adjusting effects like reverb and delay. While these parameters are all also accessible under parameter automation, they're grouped more logically here and you can adjust them without moving your hands away from the keyboard.
When you touch one of these knobs, you get told what you're adjusting, though annoyingly not what the new value is. Some people prefer this, I personally wish I could hear it sometimes because it may not always be apparent what you have something set to particularly with parameters that have only a handful of settings. Also, which parameters are mapped varies wildly from plugin to plugin, and this even applies to native instruments own offerings. As an example, both Monark and Prism which are both synthesizers, allow you to adjust just about everything - parameters for each oscilators, the LFOs, and effects, while FM8 and massive only expose the most basic parameters like ADSR so if you were expecting being able to tweak every operator individually and build a patch from scratch you'd probably be really disappointed. Thankfully, the NKS library forDexed, which is another FM synth similar to FM8 but free, includes over 20 pages of parameters exposing every parameter for every oscillator. So when you consider buying a plugin, it's a good idea to do research, first of all to see whether it has NKS compatibility or not and if it does how deep it goes. Thankfully there are now sites cropping up, like kk-access and nksftw which also has a companion YouTube channel, that review plugins with NKS to see how good their implementation is.
So in summary, while I'd say that the komplete ecosystem is far from perfect, and definitely has shortcomings that should be addressed, it does make many plugins that would normally be very hard if not outright inaccessible to use, into ones that can be accessed quite pleasantly, and Native is very slowly but surely improving the software accessibility. It kinda sucks that we require a certain, specific controller to use software that sighted people can use with any setup, but it's an option we didn't have a few years earlier and to be fair the controller itself is really good.
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