It's not the availability of soft synths that he's saying encourage wonkification, he's saying it's the controllers. I don't think this is entirely right, as optimum said it's never really been difficult to automate parameters on soft synths. In identifying Novation though he might be on to something in that they have this technology called Automap which is supposed to make your hardware controller automatically map it's controls to whichever synth or effect plugin you bring up. Setting those things up can be a pain in the arse and not really conducive to the uh creative flow. So the idea is it makes twisting knobs on screen based synths more convenient. I've heard that Automap can be a bit ropey though.
Yeah Joker has some nice gearage by the looks of it. Alesis Andromeda which is a very powerful modern analogue synth and lots of outboard compressors, pre-amps etc. That's the sort of thing big news techno and minimal producers get up to as well.