MV been centre of my setup for 8 years now, happy to help if you need to know anything. Overall I'd say go for it, extremely powerful standalone machine. Eats MPCs for breakfast in so many ways.
I think one reason the MV is tarred with a 'difficult to use' brush is the interface makes use of standard musical notation in places, e.g. crotchets, minims. If you have a basic grounding in theory then it's fine, but I can imagine someone might struggle if they have never taken one piano lesson - those people may get on with the MPC better out of the box.