I can’t imagine how much work went into making polyphonic audio work as well as it did in Cubase, but the middle-tier of Melodyne is worth it’s weight in gold (ok, maybe my weight). I recently used it to fix two bum notes in an otherwise perfect guitar part, and I couldn’t hear the edit, and it was much easier than punching in or splicing. I don’t want Steinberg going nuts trying to create polyphonic Variaudio in Cubase and shifting a ton of resources to that while everything else suffers when Melodyne already does it so well. For the folks who want Polyphonic Audio Editing in Cubase I say, “you already have it, it’s called Melodyne, wait for a sale and buy it - it’s absolutely worth it.”
Definitely would like to see the ARA2 issues continued to get ironed out though. Particularly the fades/audio edits not being audible. Ran into that while doing a vocal the other day.