Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me creating the exact sound is not very interesting from sound designing perspective. You can always sample the real instrument. Like physical modeling synthesis, the interesting part is to compress the sound to some parameters that you can tweak and generate new sounds Another approach is VAE, which also you give your some latent embedding, you can tweak the embedding to generate new sound. However the meaning o…
"You can always sample the real instrument." This doesn't really work on instruments like guitars. Open D sounds way different than fretted D on the E string. Timbre changes with position and it's one of the ways I determine where a player's hands are on the neck when I'm trying to play their song.
Before the rise of the steel string and the Spanish guitar, guitars tended to be more even across their range and also had less bass which helped even them out, and now that sound is what we are used to. There have always been niches that wanted that more even sound, but for most that just makes it more difficult to play all that music that developed around these quirks, so they remain niches.