I'm aware it's been a while, I've just been busy with other stuff.

It's like having a plane and using it to drive on a road.

That is the best analogy I've seen in a long time, and I absolutely agree. Synthesizers could be revolutionizing music as we speak, but no, anyone who happens to use one uses it for these absolutely unrealistic sounds. Why not just hire an orchestral section!?
This is why I personally am grateful for Promethean synth users--like Sun Ra, like Kraftwerk, and of course like Devo... They push the envelope and search for sounds that sound like a synthesizer, and nothing but a synthesizer--and daring to do so in an era where doing this could clear out your audience in a few minutes, and nobody wanted to hear someone write a song. We truly need more musical pioneers.

Also, I'm re-listening to "Space Probe" and noticing that Ra's making sounds that sound like trains, vehicles, machinery, Sci-Fi soundboards, and the Cybermen from Dr. Who, just to name a few things. To say the least, I'm shocked and impressed. Why have I turned such a blind eye towards this guy for so long?

889833
Well, he was pretty much impossible to label, but he did consider his music jazz. Not free, though. He didn't believe in freedom... In fact, a lot of his songs sound completely improvised, but were written, arranged and rehearsed extensively. Others really were random: there's an album, "Strange Strings", where he gave his band a bunch of stringed instruments that they didn't know how to play. Basically, the bass player is the only one who knows what he's doing... The result is interesting, to say the least

I don't play the keyboards myself, I play the sax, so I don't have a whole lot of choice in the sounds I can get and when I think of all the awesome stuff you can do with synthesizers, I'm depressed every time I hear someone playing some crappy digitized horn or violin... It's like having a plane and using it to drive on a road.
So far, the only modern band I know that makes good use of synths is Medeski Martin & Wood.

889644 This guy was labeled as free jazz?
I wonder what a Sun Ra Beatnik would've been like

I have nearly seven hours' worth of songs featuring the Moog on my computer, but even the most sonically mutated of them--I now see that none of them could touch Sun Ra.

Props to you... along with the rest of the plane

889023
Those were some crazy sounds. I don't listen to much rock usually, but I think I'll look for more of that

It's fun that, for once, it wasn't the Arkestra who drove the listeners away. They say that, usually, half the audience would leave at the first "space chord". It's sad that Sun Ra's been so overlooked, most people thought he was a fraud or just plain crazy... His music was definitely not "easy listening", but it's really worth digging into. Older records are close to pure jazz, but already way ahead of the time. Since we're talking keyboards, here's a couple of songs from 1956: this one might be the first jazz recording with an electric piano ever and this one has Ra playing the Hammond organ.

His later songs went really far out, some of them tend to be 20 minutes of noise... But there's still a lot of listenable stuff to enjoy. Here's more synth fun, for example.

888477 Damn, I'm hooked on Sun Ra now!

speaking of which, Sun Ra almost played a Halloween party in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1975. Why "Almost"? Because the venue cleared out after the opening band chased everyone off. They, too, were Moog fanatics, but they bastardized them. That band was an early incarnation of Devo. if you're interested at all, parts of the concert recording are here and here.