I’ve been enjoying some of the old threads and debates about whether
the Montage was the successor to the SY77-85.

http://www.motifator.com/index.php/forum/viewthread/476640/

or whether the Montage was the successor to the Motif.

Some folks are still getting it wrong to this day.  Montage is not the successor to Motif. The true successor to the Motif is Cubase!

https://new.steinberg.net/cubase/?_sp=f55ed776-e3c3-481c-93e1-2471b8a99ae7.1549953300770

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwjvH1_Wd2w

Rather than just get out of the synthesizer market altogether, Yamaha revived the SY77-85 line, so that they would have a flagship in the professional synthesizer market space.

And Yamaha decided they could not compete with KORG in the synthesizer workstation space, so they decided to get out of the workstation synthesizer business and focus on their Digital Audio Workstation business/cash cow (Cubase!)

Yamaha’s cover story that the customers were demanding a new performance synthesizer, was largely balderdash.

Cubase 10 was at NAMM 2019 and Motif was not.  If you look at the Cubase site, it sounds a lot like how Yamaha use to try to sell Motif LOL.  Motif was a placeholder for Cubase in Yamaha’s portfolio for a while and when the time was right they retired it.

So officially and for the record, Montage/MoDX is a bigger, better, stronger, modern version of the SY-77 that allows Yamaha to maintain a product in the professional synthesizer space, and

Cubase is the real successor of the Motif (At least from Yamaha’s perspective) that allows Yamaha to compete with Korg in the synthesizer workstation market.

A word of advice to Yamaha though.,,

“A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush....”