It doesn’t need a genius for this, but just someone with a lot of passion and time.
It’s not. It’s the only chance to realise “really” new ideas.
We’ve got lynched for every single button or functionality that we dared remove in new releases. Backwards compatibility is not an option, it’s a requirement for a project like this.
Renoise is build on the base idea of trackers. Trackers are build on the base ideas of patterns. There was no graphical “automation” back then. Songs most of the time where build with the help of repeating patterns. So that’s where the idea of those patterns comes from.
Depending on how you use Renoise this can be really helpful, or a pain in the ass. In your current workflow they seem to be just limiting. Maybe because you started to get more and more into the traditional linear timeline workflow in other DAWs (Bitwig in your case).
It’s a good idea, really. But it will be frustrating to raise it here.
That’s why I recommended that your time maybe will be spent better in raising those ideas in a project which isn’t bound that much onto backwards compatibility. Take the best of the two worlds that you now know very well an combine it into something new, instead of trying to make one of them like the other one.
Removing patterns just in the Lua API isn’t really going to solve any problem either. The Lua API is a representation of how Renoise deals with stuff internally. It must be, in order to allow access to all it’s features.
But this doesn’t mean that you can’t build your own abstraction layer on top of this which allows you to do on some specific thing more easily. Just like joule said. One good example are the existing lua pattern iterators. They are doing exactly this.