I would like to think that you mean it positively. He's a big mofo who's doing big good work for Spectrasonics, Roland etc ...

 

It's interesting to me how Eric usually garners respect on forums while Roland often gets bashed. From what I can tell Eric is an entrepreneur (he doesn't actually do any of the programming of the products he sells) with good public relations skills who has taken ideas which he and others developed at Roland and ran with them. He's developed an image of a sort of daring adventurer, braving dangerous caves to retrieve rare audio samples for us.

You may notice that on the other hand, Roland engineers are almost completely unknown to us by name, despite having created probably the most well known synthesizers ever. This may be largely a difference between Eastern and Western values. Perhaps the best known individual from Roland is in fact Eric, at least here in the West, despite the fact that the founder of the company itself recently passed away. In the West we value individual entrepreneurship and the hero of the show. (especially now, post-neoliberalism)

Roland, which we should remember is a large company and thus tends to follow more closely what the market demands, has had to bend more toward what their customers had been demanding which was recreations of their old synths rather than continuing to pursue a lot of the most innovative technologies that they had been working on (such as the V-Synths) and which products such as Omnisphere have benefited from. Their expensive new-technology hardware synths just weren't selling enough to keep them in development.

A lot of people were asking for Roland to just build more actual Jupiter 8's and TR-808's, etc. What they've done instead is come very close to replicating these old synths in a digital form which can be used in a versatile manner (plugged out to hardware) for a relatively low cost and has the potential to be used in a wide variety of ways in the future.

I'm beginning to see the commonly heard negative reactions to the success of Roland as a psychological backlash from the embarrassingly painful and unnecessary usage of nuclear weapons which ended World War Two. Roland's success as a company came through overcoming the harsh economic conditions following that, and it is undertones of racism that I read into the overall difference in reactions.