I think they totally blew it with the drums, though. Drums are much simpler instruments which could have been pretty much exactly duplicated in the game. Instead, “The four pads will commonly change functionality to represent other drums, depending on the requirements of a song”. What starts as the snare drum at the start of the song may turn into the a tom during a fill, then into a cymbal later. The bummer there is that they broke the simple physical and audible connections which make drums learnable, so instead of learning to play what you hear by muscle memory, you’re learning to hit a colored pad in time with what you see on the screen. People can learn their way around that, I’m sure, but it was a very unfortunate move on the part of the game designers. It’s like they made you sing the color names on the screen instead of the words to the song, or a video typing game that taught in modified Dvorak layout. It’s an arbitrary decision which doesn’t do anything to help new Rock Band players, wastes what could be an opportunity to accidentally learn something, and prevents people who can keep a beat on drums from sitting down and playing.

Maybe they did it to keep profits up – maybe some songs needed more pads, and more pads would have raised the price outside of their profit projections or something. But at least they could have sold a “rock band pro drums add on kit” or something. This isn’t any criticism of people that play Rock Band, it’s a criticism of the game design. Your time and money, your game. It’s just frustrating to see them unnecessarily mangle the user experience here for no real purpose.

And, yes, I’ve seen your subsequent post with the guy playing with Consolas and Cambria. As commenters noted, he already played drums, so that doesn’t really prove anything.

Oh, and the thousands of dollars thing kills me. It’s cheaper to buy a cheap, used guitar than Rock Band. Some people decide to fetishize music music equipment, maybe as a way of keeping it as a nice but unobtainable dream rather than have to actually buckle down and learn to play. With the exception of some orchestra equipment, you can get ugly but usable versions of most instruments for under $100.