Is it just me, or does Kontakt 8 suck?

It's always a challenge when a product gets a complete makeover as all the normal workflow you've been using gets disrupted. I still have mixed feelings about it. To be honest 90% of the time I use Komplete Kontrol rather than Kontakt so it's not as disruptive for me, but like you I have quite a number of non-NI libraries from Spitfire, 8DIO, and numerous other sources and it's been a challenge for some of them even in Komplete Kontrol. I recently had a fairly specialized library (banjo) that I could only get to load in Kontakt 7. Glad I kept a copy around.

For me I'm a bit more forgiving since I spent most of my career in commercial software development and I understand the trade-offs and difficulties in trying to achieve progress in more advanced functionality while maintaining consistency with the past. In fact I'd have to say if it weren't for classic view I probably wouldn't be using Kontakt 8 at all. Without that global access in other views, operating Kontakt in standalone mode when I'm looking for sounds that might work for a project is basically non functional. That's simply a mind-numbing decision to have been made in the design as it pretty much precludes the use of all the additional tools that they added to Kontakt which were really at the core of the advancement of new "useful" features and explains why I've not yet found a productive use for them.

I do understand the global usefulness of the underlying changes in the technology as it moves to a more industry standard spec for library access and potential advancements in MIDI and am willing to be patient to see how that might play out in the future so I'm willing to tolerate a certain amount of pain. But the lack of globally available standalone BPM access along with the inability to access some very useful non-NI libraries is going to be the two things, in my case, to preclude me from even considering the use of the fancy new tools yet.

Its you.I love it!!😀

In my Opinion, the thought behind Kontakt 8 is awesome, with all the additional tools in mind. BUT for now, its almost unusable when working with 3rd party libraries since they do not have Banks and Kontakt 8 is not able to read the folder-structure they deliver… so as an example: Audio Imperia Nucleus - instead of having a nice structure of a few folder where everything is sorted you end up looking to hundreds of single files/presets… same with Keepforest Devastator… messed up with Kontakt 8.
It was too early to release Kontakt 8… really leaves a bad taste in your mouth and people still use Kontakt 7 because exactly that reason… The Product Owner of Kontakt 8 did a bad Job. Or the NI Management let him do a bad job… however, Kontakt 8 is not ready yet.