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Originally Posted by superblonde.org
Nothing says a piano today couldn't have multicolored keys, or programmable-color backlighted keys (some trainer-keyboards have LED's per key), it's just adding more design innovation and added manufacturing cost, right? Currently lights on keys are considered gimmicks, again relative to "purity of tradition" but cast that falsity away and interesting new improvements could happen?
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Simplicity, robustness and accessibility are important considerations too. Multicoloring would have to account for different color vision deficiencies, for example.
I used to use colored paper strips placed on keys when learning theory. Gave them up for same reason as one gives up training wheels on a bicycle - more freedom after enough has been learned.
Nowadays I prefer the plain piano keyboard not because of tradition, but because it is close to absolute required minimum for the task. Anything more would just get in the way and require more mental resources.
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On the side of hope, we're entering the era of self-manufacturing - 3D printers, sub-$10K CNC machining mills, and so on. More and more people can afford personal ownership of powerful means of production (yay for capitalism, heh).
There is a good chance for bigger boutique manufacturer movement for new control interfaces. What stands in the way (besides costs that are destined to go down eventually) is indeed the massive inertia of traditions and the need of any new solution to be truly better than the old one. Both are very hard to surpass.
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As a sidenote, most often I use the piano keyboard for concept development and a Wacom Cintiq for actual composition - drawing directly into piano roll, note positions and lengths corresponding to pen strokes.
The latter workflow is so rare that (AFAIK) no major DAW company has implemented support for Wacom pen pressure, in order to input also velocity and/or other note parameters in a single stroke of pen.
It's probably the most sensible way to "write" music by hand in a DAW, but I don't expect any DAW to support it properly until stylus/pen support is ubiquitous on all personal computing devices, which will take at least 10 more years, I think.