In theory quantisation should snap everything into perfect time, and quantised swing will still be perfectly mechanical. But there are a number of reasons why the timing might drift.
This is trivially easy to test. Use the pads to record a groove with a standard collection of samples. Replace the samples with clicks. Patch each track to the separate outputs and record into a DAW. Any timing shifts will be very obvious, down to individual samples.
With respect to Mr Linn, he's quite wrong about randomisation being uninteresting. Real drummers play with a Gaussian distribution, even when they're playing to a click. The tiny variations add a surprising amount of interest and liveliness.
But this works best as a dynamic performance effect, and I've never seen it implemented in a drum machine. Baking a randomised uniform distribution into a short repeating pattern is a lot less interesting.
Agreed re: there being randomness with each hit in a live performance. I wonder, though, if the distribution of one hit is in fact independent of the previous -- perhaps the inner feedback loop of "am I falling behind / speeding up" in a musician causes the next distribution to be skewed differently or centered at a different instant.
In which case I can understand the thought process of it being uninteresting, in a way. And you're absolutely right that when the randomness is applied into a short loop and repeated it falls into a strange uncanny valley (at least to my ears).
Perhaps another aspect of this is that the randomness, added based on e.g. a seed to the whole track, would be hard to control as an artist. I know when I apply randomness to MIDI I tend to go back with a fine-toothed comb and re-distribute hits that don't go where my mind wants them to.
This is trivially easy to test. Use the pads to record a groove with a standard collection of samples. Replace the samples with clicks. Patch each track to the separate outputs and record into a DAW. Any timing shifts will be very obvious, down to individual samples.
With respect to Mr Linn, he's quite wrong about randomisation being uninteresting. Real drummers play with a Gaussian distribution, even when they're playing to a click. The tiny variations add a surprising amount of interest and liveliness.
But this works best as a dynamic performance effect, and I've never seen it implemented in a drum machine. Baking a randomised uniform distribution into a short repeating pattern is a lot less interesting.