If you have an opportunity to sample pianos in 24bit/96kHz and 100 layers, which engine would you go with? Kontakt, Aria, etc?

 

I assume you are talking about the playback ending, as neither one of those are "samplers" per se, but sample playback software with scripting. I personally would lean towards Kontakt, as it has very deep scripting abilities and some great sounding fx that you can use to do something as simple as add convolution reverb, to granular craziness to pretty good sounding filters etc....