You know those trills and spins you do with the grain density? If you don't have an image that matches them, they stand out. And if you looooove listening to a grain density collision, that's awesome. But if you've owned a Kyma for ten years and actively fight grain density collisions because they call attention to themselves, they don't do much for you.

Audioease had a great little plugin called Riverrun that was basically granular synthesis as effect, rather than alpha/omega. It was really handy for using GS musically without calling attention to itself. I've used it on vocals a few times, for example. They've discontinued it, but it's still available to download as part of their nautilus bundle. Not sure if it's going to nag you for registration or what...

Re: Stereo - the problem with stereo is that the sweet spot is much smaller than people imagine so for the majority of viewers it disintegrates into "left" or "right" because precedence dominates stupid quickly. That's actually the secret reason Dolby pushed so hard into Atmos: it actually allows for much better imaging for the audience of stereo signals. The whizzbang object-oriented shit is just icing. Was your installation visible only from the front? Or could people walk around it?

Talk me into Alchemy. 'cuz at this point, I have no compunctions about torrenting that shit.