I haven't read all the posts here and my limited experience with Mixcraft hardly seems worth anyone's time to even read this post. However, (you knew it was coming) I do like a live feel for performances and MIDI just falls short in my book, in many ways, but particularly in the rhythm quantization.
I do not want perfect or even 'humanized' rhythms with the VSTi's but would rather just do the performance and add instrumentation that is coincidental to whatever nuanced rhythms show up in the piano roll.
It would be nice to have a capability of being able to overlay one piano roll over another and then line up the current 'working' instrument with the nuanced performance. That would be sort of like taking a layered approach, e.g., in Photoshop.
Or, more than likely, there's already a method in MC and I just don't know it.
I did try to actually copy and paste one over the other and it was a disaster.
If you need an example I just completed this:
https://soundcloud.com/quiet-painter/5-minutes-of-happy
At 1:05 there was a syncopation that I had a heck of a time matching up with the percussion and while doing that thought up a (another?) way it could be done satisfactorily. -h