It would be interesting to be "a fly on the wall" when Yamaha developers and marketers are having these kind of discussions. Hopefully they monitor these forums and in particular with the E series, consult with teachers with questions like; 1, Do these databases help with your teaching by steering students to learn to play melody and chords while the box takes care of arranging or do they distract from learning keyboard technique and music theory? 2. What are the differing needs between children learning to play and adults learning to play?3. If Yamaha's goal is to see customers progress from an entry level keyboard to a more and more advanced levels of devices, which features support that goal, particularly as it applies to the MDB feature? Correspondingly, which features like MDB can be traded off for more advanced features like more style variations, S.ArtLite voices, etc?
If one of the goals of the E Series is to learn to read music because that is a common trait amongst those who buy a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. product from them, would not making a simple sheet music easily available promote that goal? As a guitar player, I can find almost every song imaginable in multiple formats for a reasonable cost, even though they too make subtle changes to avoid copyright issues, but this gets me going to come up with my own strumming patterns, chord inversions, tempo changes, etc., that in some ways mimic what is fun with playing an arranger keyboard. Maybe the Yamaha guitar gurus and the Yamaha keyboard gurus need to share their meetings.