Oh, I agree LSP has issues, but I only ran 8 universes (1 pixelnet universe) last year and am only thinking of 9 or 10 this year. I don't have enough lights to go much past that.
I used xlights as my player and it worked flawlessly on an ancient laptop - we are talking gateway 200ARC
1.4GHz Pentium-M, 512MB RAM - if it gets hit by lightning, it's no big loss.
As for LSP, I had a time getting the effects right so that it would output a show file without crashing. It seemed to be some kind of event limit that I kept running up against. My sequencing computer is an i7 laptop, but LSP did not use most of the available threads... I don't want to use this one as the player - If it gets hit by lightning, it'll cost $1500 to replace... I don't want to hook this one to a wire that runs outside...
And no, the LSP file would not run period until I converted it to an xseq file for xlights.
Where LSP shines is the ability to map video. I did very little individual channel sequencing. I used mostly video clips and the matrix animator.
The key thing that I'm picking on with all of the universes is that you need to either have some lights hooked up or have a separate machine emulating the output. The color spirals running on my tree need continuous data flow. If you miss an update, the tree will get the jitters and jumps. Something you won't see unless you have lights hooked up.
I'm not saying anything bad about HLS - I have no basis by which to pass judgement.
I'm just a bit skeptical... And as someone once said, "In God we trust, all others must bring data."
To the developer, keep at it... When I get some free time, I'll take a closer look.
RM