Welcome to the forum! I don’t really understand the need for a swap feature, or see the benefit in it unless you’re auditioning arrangements for a song, but song mode already sort of has that covered if you like doing it that way.
If you prefer the way you’re stating it, seems like pattern chaining is the way to go because you can make the pattern chain in any order you want and then try it with another chained arrangement until you’re committed to something. Or maybe I’m not understanding the function of swap as you envision it?
Automated pattern transition sounds pretty cool! It’s a bit like a patch morph feature that you find on various other synths from a few other manufacturers and the duration of the morph is set by the patten length except instead of morphing between patches you’re automating parameter morphing between pattern transitions.
That could be good if you were feeling like you couldn’t handle doing a smooth motion recording and would probably be a more reliable way of getting from A to B where parameters are concerned, especially if there were a few preset curves. I’d be interested to see how that idea would work in practice, especially on digitone.
I don’t think Elektron employees generally look for feature suggestions where you’re posting this so it’s unlikely the idea will be conveyed in any meaningful way but there is a feature requests thread which I’m pretty sure they do check from time to time if you want to share this here:
for all machines
or here for syntakt
or here for digitone
or here for digitakt
And you’re absolutely correct that one of the great things about these machines is how well they play together, but it’s always great to find ways to make them more awesome individually or together! Let’s hope we can get some of this stuff in the future.
Oh, and there’s also a direct email address if you want to send in feature requests that way which is feature-request@elektron.se so you could try that if you want to pass it along directly, just so you have that resource as well.