I thought the questions posed, were more ‘forward looking’, rather than after a retrospective of why.
whats done in the past usually is done for good reason, I certainly did not question it ,
but technology moves forward, particularly trying to make things easer for end users, and products are often updated to reflect this.
so question is… if monome do a 2019/2020 update, should it be usb midi class compliant?
perhaps the answer is no,
perhaps its too much development effort, that monome feel would be better spent on new products, so it just ‘priority’
(“too much” here means compared to the ‘reward’ e.g. existing users have not requested it much, would not bring many new customers)
thats not an issue… all other grids use note on with velocity to do exactly this.
some then have ‘extended’ apis to go beyond this and improve efficiency, e.g. to clear the entire grids without sending 128 note offs.
(to be clear here, Push/Launchpad all work over midi, for the pads/button… so not only can it be done, it has already been done 
)
