Will the next Maschine Plus Update be a paid update?

I would never have considered buying Maschine+ if it didnt come with Kontakt & Reaktor. The biggest draw for me in the Maschine+ standalone was the potential of creating unique sound generators and deep sampled instruments without lugging a computer around. A pity Reaktor & Kontakt support ended up being at the level it is now (no way to generate MIDI, ext sidechain input has been broken since 2.14 or 2.16, Kontakt sometimes loads without sound, etc).

I got into M+ because of the DIY potential; I stayed because I learned to love the Maschine UI/UX for beatmaking.

If M+ didnt have ambitious softsynths onboard, it would have had zero appeal to me over something like an MPC X. It is better to have the potential of pinning the CPU with complex stuff, than to only have instruments that keep things safe and boring - at least then I can make informed decisions about how I want to use that CPU power. Why not blow 75% of CPU to make a single layered sound, then resample it to a pad, bypass all the plugins and keep going.. its how we used to use softsynths in the late 90s/early 2000s.

I also notice that utilizing an external audio interface will decrease overall CPU perfomance significantly. If you find yourself running out of CPU constantly and are using an ext audio interface, consider removing it or replacing it with a Komplete Audio series interface (as they have drivers in M+ standalone unlike every other audio interface, IME this helps)