Sometimes we don’t need the sustain and release parts of the envelopes, f.ex. with percussive sounds. So why not to make it possible to turn the envs into AD mode by turning the sustain and release all the way down to hard zero, 0.0000000.
The problem with the current model in some cases is that if I turn the R to zero, the envelope jumps to zero at noteoff, which is sometimes trouble for percussion style playing, f.ex. with pads. If I turn the R up, the envelope goes through both at least a part of D and full R stage, and I don’t always want that, because that may make playing pitched percussion on a keyboard more challenging, especially bc I need to turn the sustain up because a keyboard isn’t as fast as pads. And if S is at zero, then the R curve isn’t visible, making editing it quite cumbersome.
If that would remove the release all together we would have an envelope that goes through A and D, possibly also delay and hold, with a noteon of any length, and we didn’t need to waste an LFO to have that behavior. Plus, the editing is different, sometimes it’s just more practical and convenient to use an envelope.
If an user wants to maintain current behavior, they can just turn the R up to 0.0000001 or so, nothing would be lost, and we would have more options to control our patches. Who uses near-zero release times anyway, that’s just asking for clicks and pops.