[dwringer]

I appreciate your response, though my point wasn't to "prove [the above poster] wrong", but that the ability to slide notes in chords is not exclusively dependent on a specific FL Studio plugin and has always traditionally been the domain of synthesizer builders rather than the MIDI standard. Perhaps the effect is more uncommon in music through the past few decades as a result of this, but it's not absent and dedicated musicians with enough resources were still able to make it work.

I do agree that it is a potentially limiting influence on the music most readily produced, but for that matter (IMO) so is the traditional adherence to 12-tone equal temperament that is often implicit in how the standard is implemented. It would be nice to have finer control here without having to resort to various hacks, but finer resolution means more bits required to represent a given frequency. Finding a different better way to encode MIDI data that could be used as a standard going into the future is something that I believe requires great consideration and might do well with a significantly different approach (but I don't presume to have given it enough thought to say one way or the other).