Just my subjective, personal opinion (I have an acoustic upright with a silent system that I connect via MIDI-out to my notebook where I am running Galaxy Vintage D):
[...]A DP can be an upgrade from an AP!
+1 I endorse this with special emphasis on your wording. It
can be an upgrade from
an acoustic, or, to be precise, from acoustic pianos that are not high end and taken care of by a specialist technician and standing in a concert hall or a professional recording studio. I find my virtual grand so good that I do not want to play, let alone record, the acoustic part of my piano in my living room any more. By the way, my piano is a Sauter, not a budget instrument at all, though 50 years old and needing some overhaul.
[...]I have the best piano vst’s (25+) and a Kawai MP11SE controller. Super fast computer, RME soundcard , recording at 96KHz and 32 bit floating point. But real recorded piano’s even the most simplistic intro’s on good recording artists sound better, more real, warmer, more organic, more everything.
+1 as well ...but when I listen to professional and commercial studio recordings of the great star pianists on Youtube, I can hear a considerable difference to my own recordings, even when I add more reverb with Audacity. VSTs sound "flat" and "cold" in direct comparison.
But all in all, given the fact that I do not have access to a professional studio or a concert hall with a high end instrument, I am extremely happy with my setup at the moment. It sounds fantastic as long as you do not compare it directly with a professional recording of an oustanding acoustic that was selected for recording purposes by Yuja Wang (she did that for the Elbphilharmonie in my hometown; after the first round she said, none of the various Steinways was good enough; after an additional round of test playing , she eventually found
the one and only Steinway that was good enough in her eyes).