Ah ha, a thing I have experience with. I’ve been through a lot of them.
Arturia Pigments is probably my #1 all rounder. If I’m trying to build a specific sound, I usually start there because it can pretty much do everything. I run 2 or 3 instances of it in some songs, which is safer than with some other plugins.
Roland Cloud Zenology has great sounds if you’re into scrolling through thousands of presets. On the plus side, the subscription is pretty cheap and you can find most anything. On the downside, they’re resource hogs and demand that you be online at inconvenient times when it forgets that you were logged in mere hours before. Actually, I haven’t had that problem in a while, so it may finally be fixed.
I use Native Instruments Super 8, Vintage Organs, Session Strings, Session Horns, and Massive X a lot. All good stuff. I use Noire a bit, but usually just the particles engine with a Wurly sound on my keyboard. There is some slight additional complication of running multiple instruments in Kontakt, but nothing major.
I usually just use the pianos on my keyboard, but when I don’t, I’ve mostly settled on Addictive Keys. I’ve had issues with loading times and latency with other VSTs. To be fair, I haven’t gone through the others since I got a new laptop, so that may be less of an issue these days. Noire seems to be popular for just normal piano playing with others.
Cherry Audio makes some great emulations of classic synths for cheap, I use Low Down (Moog Taurus) and Eight Voice (Oberheim) a lot - BUT they’re very accurate to the hardware, not necessarily to the mastered sounds you hear on records. You may want to run them through other effects to get your final sound. Usually Arturia Mello-Fi (tape saturation) and Relab LX480 Essentials (reverb) do the trick for me. I actually throw them on most analog synth VSTs.
I used a lot of Waves plugins a few years ago, but I had issues with pre-loading and their dumb update costs. The plugins themselves would pre-load in the set list, but the samples wouldn’t load until you played something, and they weren’t exactly fast. Don’t know if that’s been fixed, I finally got mad and quit using all of them.
I also used to use EastWest Composer Cloud. Many great sounds, but mostly not oriented to live playing. They do have a lot of light and single articulation patches that work just fine, but the subscription is kind of overkill just for that. I picked up their String Machine on sale, which is a really cool little plugin.
It occurs to me that I may have a VST hoarding problem.