I feel you. Looking back on it, the reason there's so much in this piece is probably mostly due to a bit of laziness combined with the poor time management of this entire project. 60% of material that went on to be used in this project was generated in one session about three months ago, so naturally it all came from the same sort of techniques/approach. When it came to actually getting this thing done, we had about 2 weeks from start of finish. In hindsight and looking forward, I definitely could do more to take my sounds away from their base processes.

Alchemy is really great. The company did halt business, but no-one is quite sure yet whether they've were bought out or not. I don't know much how to talk you into it as my conceptual and practical knowledge of synthesis has only recently diverged from messing around with presets. It's a pretty mega synth. To qoute SoS: "Alchemy not only features additive synthesis, but also spectral and granular synthesis and resynthesis, and sample import, along with the more typical virtual analogue engine found in most other software synths". It's really easy to get great sounds out of, pads especially. You essentially have the option to load in 1-4 sources, which could be a sample, a square wave, etc. Then you can process each one individually in a section that looks like this:

It then has the usual stuff you'd expect on a synth to treat the patch as whole. It also has a thing called the 'remix pad' which essentially a load of preset filter and envelop configurations which you mix around with on any sound patch desire.

Sound on Sound did a whole article on it, so they can explain much better than I.

Edit: Oh, and yes, people were only allowed in front of the installation. It was only shown once as well so we got everyone into an alright position before starting.