I did a lot of project work about 15 years ago. Due to a limited budget, I arranged most of the drums, bass and keyboard tracks on a MIDI rack synth. I became increasingly annoyed with the process overhead--arrange in MIDI, then record each individual instrument, and, for the drums, each individual drum, then mix, to the point where I really felt it was a negative force in the creative process.
Back then soft synthesizers were of limited use to me because high latencies made it difficult to jam to and record MIDI tracks along with audio. They also took up too much processing power.
On to the question. My current synthesizer is as generic as they come, so I'm not married to its sounds. Are soft synths feasible today? Are they practical substitutes on a decent Mac/PC or would you still need to blow the bank on a maxed out Mac Pro/PC?
If I had a real hammond organ or a real electric piano I would definitely still use the real thing. But for all the other stuff, it would be nice to replace the hardware synth with some decent soft synths.