Reaktor question

Does anybody here use Reaktor in a stand-alone way? How do you like it, if you do this?

I sometimes use Reaktor as a live loop player to provide background ambiance for a friend's band. I like it.. a lot. Because I can slap all my custom effects and whatnot on the loops and mix and filter them to taste. I actually used to use Reaktor as my main mixing and recording environment a few years back, with everything being driven by a hardware sequencer. It was probably my favorite setup ever. Loads of fun. Now I mostly use Reaktor inside Cubase for glitch and delay effects.

i used to use it a lot in a stand-alone way, often recording long jam sessions listening to them on their own or taking pieces and snippets from those jams and reconstitute them into a track.

PRetty much these days i only use it as a VST effect/sampler/synthesizer. I have loads of favorite standby reaktor patches i constantly use in my songs, a lot of them very old ones.

I havent downloaded a new reaktor patch in ages, the best sounding newer ones are very bloat-ware, extremely crash prone and just plain cryptic. I Find reaktor's newer more complex patches very hard to reverse engineer. Plogue Bidule i find myself using more often for standalone reaktor-like play.

I think Reaktor is a fantastic program, if it wasn't for Reaktor 3 im not sure i would have released my first electronic music lp.

Reaktor 3 had a really approachable useful user library. They had patches that served simple functions like a reverb with 2 knobs and a straight foward delay that were very easy to use pieces from in your own patch. I felt Reaktor 4 was a little bit of a downward slide as far as the user library was concerned, while the patches blew me away sonically, some of them sounding as good as Absynth, the patches purely as a learning tool for people like me were seriously lacking. I kind of lost all hope with Reaktor 5, ill still use it, but Reaktor 3/4 is fired up 9 times out of 10