[lotyrin]

Significantly better sounding synth sound is nowhere near that far out of reach. The sound he's trying to recreate is not something that comes out of a commercial stack of "$2000 boxes".

Da Funk's lead can be reasonably approximated with cheaply available modeling software, or moderately priced analog synths. Here's someone getting decently close with Massive, which is around 200 dollars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB1_JxbT_1s

The article's sound is just still too simple. I've not used Octave, but I'm sure that with some work, it could achieve quite a bit more.