Any headline with a question...
Of course it depends on what you want to do and what you are used to.
Technically, regardless of the rest of the product design there are high quality potentiometers available both as linear faders or rotary knobs. I guess dirt is more likely to get into a linear fader and make it scratchy - especially in a club environment.
I think what's going on with consonance is that there is an implied lower pitch that all the partials are harmonics of - that also works when there are just sine waves.
The Sony PCM-F1 was one of these - and was the first time I got confused between "is this live or is this the playback?" because until then it had been obvious.
or if the lock is on some smaller part you might be able to still render the audio but e.g. not update the settings that changed yet, and try again next time.
Phase itself looks random, but what makes the sound blurry is that the phase doesn't line up like it should across frequencies at transients. Maybe something the model could grab hold of better is phase discontinuity (deviation from the expected phase based on the previous slices) or relative phase between peaks, encoded as colour?
But the same thing could be done as a post-processing step, finding points where the spectrum is changing fast and resetting the phases to make a sharper transient.
Yes it's a good decision, and 'the standard' for audio in the same way as 32-bit ARGB makes everything easier for graphics.
Of course there are some things that are better done with ints or maybe doubles, like keeping track of the time position, but for the sine wave generator it doesn't need to know how long it's been running in total, just the position in the current cycle, so floats are fine for that.
