[vdubreeze]

+1 absolutely. I just had this discussion the other day with someone who told me "if you needed blank insert slots you're doing something wrong" ; /

Dummy fx work for some but not all of the results of the inserts behavior. Just standard experimenting with changes in a chain, where you want to bring in a different EQ and compressor and A/B both against what you have, which you can't use Replace FX for, and the added go to the bottom, is what I come up against. Any solution I've tried is more work than just moving the fx to the correct slot every time. It really would be great, and an improvement, if plugins could stay in their slot no matter what happens before them, and if we could leave blank slots in a track without all the kludges that aren't quite solutions.

Sure it's not the end of the world, every time a new plugin goes to the middle of the pack you have to manually move it up from the bottom. But it's one of those things that doesn't make sense from a UI point of view to have to do, especially the 30th time you've done it that night. From a programming point of view I have no clue except what I read here, and I get it if it just can't be done. I always figured it had to do with how Reaper utilizes both the track slots and the FX window as visual representation and how the FX window would react to removed FX and retained slot. But I see no advantage at all in the fx positioning behavior as it is as opposed to other options.