Bitwig has that very helpful functionality for device parking, so the device is completely disabled and no pdc is added anymore. This is very helpful e.g. for PDC intense mastering processors, which you do not need while composing and mixing (while low latency and cpu usage matter a lot).
Maybe such a mechanism actually could be quite easy added:
If the plugin identifer was some kind of an “observable”, Renoise could append a prefix to the identifier like “sleeping_”, and the device wouldn’t be found anymore (it actually would have to reinitialize/reload). I think this logic already is already at least partly implemented, it is the same as a plugin was not installed. Then Renoise does not loose any automation and settings of the plugin and uses a placeholder.
So the only addition would be that reloading / reinitalization and changing of the plugin identifer. The data structure could stay untoched. Reloading might be helpful for the sandbox, too. If a plugin crashed in the sandbox, it simply can be reloaded (even automatically), just like in Bitwig. I actually don’t know if this is already the case in Renoise, since I never use the sandbox…
What do you think?