So, I took the time to read everything here, first to have a sense of where people were taking this thread (it effectively went into various directions, which means it was a good idea for a topic). Also, to make sure I wasn’t actually rehashing other people’s thoughts and making additionnal noise for no reason. This was very interesting, pretty much as usual on lines.
Now there’s a few things I’d like to add, which are my own understanding, both of monome norns as “GAS by mystery and mystique inducing machine” and as an SPC and why norns over, say, organelle or bella, and also, why “marketting” for lack of a better word (I like the idea raised by @zebra to call it “meaning”, so I’d say : marketting as “how Monome wants us to understand Norns”) so why “marketting” might influence this decision beyond practical criterias.
There’s an elephant in the room in this debate, that has been brought up by @zebra (who’s good at spotting elephants in the room), but wasn’t much discussed afterward : Norns, of all the SPC’s options discussed in this topic, is the most expensive one. I bring this up because, up until very recently, most SPCs were out of my league, either due to cost (even Organelle was too expensive for me) or learning curves / design choices (Bella, PiSound, Axoloti and other likeminded barebones style SPC). So, even though I could perceive very clearly the appeal of having an SPC for all the reasons already mentionned above about what we know our mind can acheive anyway anyhow (that is : a lot of things really), and how creating the specific context for our mind to effectively acheive it are just two completely different things in a real life context where we’re battling with our emotions, our lives, our instincts, our understanding of things, and the list goes on. So I was on that list of “computer musician by default” even though I had a few hardware options over the years, I could feel the weight of that setup and how it was limiting some of my creative input although I wish it didn’t and I could from time to time push that setup further by sheer force of creating artificial boundaries and treating the computer as a “virtual SPC”.
But then I could buy some stuff. And of all the SPC I bought Norns, which is, then again, the most expensive option. To answer @909one 's point about that, was there some mystique “in the know gear” to it ? Yeah sure there might be. But about this two points : Mystery, mystique, however you call it, in design isn’t NECESSARILY a bad thing, it can be, but it doesn’t have to. Design is provocative, and mystery can lead to a change in perception, this forum knows well about it, with the grid having become such an ubiquitous interface when it could have (and did) suffer the exact same criticisms about opacity when it first appeared. So there’s that about design and mystery, it’s not all bad. Then also, and that’s where I’d like to bring my own interpretation of @jasonw22 's badly perceived argument which I think should not be dismissed so quickly : This mistery, if you think only self-convincing fools cool-kids-wannabe will perceive it as a “plus”, also acted on you as repulsive. This repulsion you might have felt as 100% negative, to my eyes, is also Monome’s tranquille and peaceful way of telling you, and I can understand coming from marketting and design you might not be used to this, that INDEED YOU MIGHT NOT NEED THIS THING. It might even feel a bit cheesy said like that, but Norns comes from their heart which is rare for gear, it’s not just a piece of hardware, it’s their singular (in all the meanings of singular as at it’s core monome is just two persons) vision of what a piece of hardware could be, you don’t have to stretch too far to see there’s also a political, philisophical, emotional stance in the design of Norns specifically. And because it’s their way of seeing it, and because they’re a bit poetic like that, twisted and convoluted like that, they thought they’d also “market” it like that. It’s honest. It’s just who they are. Mystique if you will.
Now back to my point, why the hell did I buy this instead of an Organelle ? This will connect to a question that arrose initially before Norns even got out. There’s a topic on lines, where Brian asks what norns “is”. I didn’t participate at the time because well frankly, I didn’t know. What I did know however, is how deeply I connected with this forum, how fascinated I was by how people like @zebra @glia @Rodrigo @markeats @tehn and so many others perceived what “computer music” and music in general and stretching a bit further, what life in general, should be or aspire to, that I felt very strongly Norns could embody what I’d call “multiplicity through simplicity”. There were a few very strong and pragmatic arguments for it (i/o, lots of USB ports, small footprint etc. people named them all already) but still : it was fucking expensive so surely there must be another reason.
Now here I’m gonna give a very personnal reason, a reason that I think relate to this “we do it how we like to do it, “marketting” included” aspect : Monome is not trying to scale. They don’t want to. It’s not a desire they have. And you know what, in our current landscape, it’s quite a struggle I can tell you that. Even moreso when I’m pretty convinced that, should they want to, they could. So it’s realy down to them defining a way to both be who they are AND a company that makes gear. And the thing is I think not wanting to scale they had two options, make the compromises on the materials / design / and take less time to think about their finished products, or just say “well we’re very sorry that it’s so damn expensive, and we’re gonna put all the schematics out there, and all the code out there, so that maybe some other people can take care of making it affordable, but we’re just gonna go with our vision.”. You can blame them for that but I don’t because I connect to this vision. So in one sentence because I wrote too many already : I paid this higher price to allow monome not to scale, because I think that for a company that does what they do, the way they do it, it’s this price in our society. Our society is broken like that but it’s not monome’s fault. And because they’re not trying to scale, that’s the beauty of it, they don’t have to sell too many, they don’t have to fake a certain attitude to appeal to an “everyone” that (I think) doesn’t exist.
Now, about that design for an SPC, (it worked for the monome grid back in the days). Because it says nothing, shows nothing, and because the first part of the description is elusive, what I felt was not : I need this. What I felt was “I need to go read about this at the source”. And I did. I read this forum for hours and it was super nice. And Norns by design pushed me to do this, just like the blank monome grid by design pushed me to do this, in a way that no other design that I can think of pushes me to do this (other designs just want me to go watch Tutorials or read labels on the faceplate).
Which made me realise (and we’re full circle back on the original topic, DAMN !) what “Norns” is to me as an SPC :
“Norns is an ongoing conversation”
Specifically an ongoing conversation with lines. It’s a self contained box, that allows me, like I did a few times already and will continue to do, to not bring my laptop somehwere, and have people on lines still talking to me expect THROUGH MUSIC. Discussing relationship to music through a simple open ended device and interface, telling me that maybe I should stop and focus on this particular sampling method, on this particular FX, or maybe spend a little time building presets that I love by just turning a knob on planet system, and I can recognize them through process, and it feels like not only am I making music in weird places without the distraction of the internet, I’m making it WITH SOMEONE, and it so happens that there are things on lines I can’t find in other communities so yes, it is definitely a community thing.
I realized after a few weeks using it how the stripped down interface, screen, label-less knobs, was a blessing to only “hear” and “feel” what the coders / users had to tell me when I use Norns. It’s a computer you can forget about, it lets its content shine and I’m in awe of how distinctive and playful what this community has to offer is. Just like focussing on a book is that much easier than reading on a tablet.
Are all the things I just described just as easily possible with other SPCs ? Very likely. But C&G has this “cool” factor and it definitely feels more like traditionnal business (they make me feel of a smaller Teenage Engineering although I realize I’m not even sure they’re actually smaller) with them, so it’s a bit of a wild west when it comes down to knowing who they are, what’s their intent, what’s the ideological choice behind their designs and so on, and they also bring a lot more people and I like a contained community. It doesn’t mean I want to exclude people by design, it means I like knowing that the first barrier of entry is actual curiosity, a desire to UNDERSTAND, not “what it does” but “why do it like that at all”, when I know that what comes behind this curiosity is incredibly deep and meaningful and goes (to my eyes at least) much further than simple gear / tools for music-making.
And frankly, I’ll just close because I’m getting tired of reading myself talking, but I think it says it all of the intellectual sanity and perspective of this forum and of Monome that it’s one of the minds behind the code-design of Norns that created this topic, which surely is challenging the very idea that anyone could / should actually “need” their own machine. That’s what I love about this place.
Edit : this was all written before @tehn 's answer and put on hold so… Sorry for the overlap. And if Brian actually feels like I’ve put ideas and intentions behind their design that aren’t there, I’ll happily stand corrected, but nonetheless, this is what Norns as a design, Monome as a company, and Lines as a community made me understand, wether it was their intent or not 
TL;DR : Well really sorry I’m shit at making things simple.
