cruisinon2

No one has ever "missed out" on factory presets...;)

This is a user forum...nobody who can help you will ever see this. You need to open a support ticket, and L6 will tell you how to proceed.

My complaint about lima beans: They're terrible.

I know of one way to find out...;)

It's been a gripe since day one... but given that we're 10 years into the platform at this point, don't hold your breath. If there was gonna be a mobile version, they'd have done it by now.

Creating a backup file of all your patches in HX Edit is always Step 1 before updating the firmware... if you didn't do that, then anything you created yourself is gone and you're out of luck. Factory presets can always be reinstalled, but without backups for ones that you built yourself, you can't get them back.

Open a support ticket...this is a user forum, so unfortunately nobody here can help you.

In a word, no... You've not mentioned a genre, or exactly what kind of tone you're looking for..."clean" means different things to different players. Regardless, with nothing but a power amp boosting a raw instrument signal you're not going to get much. The unaltered sound of any electric guitar is never particularly breathtaking on its own no matter what kind of guitar it is, and relying on an EQ block alone to create whatever it is you're looking for is a recipe for failure. Tone comes from an amp model, not an EQ. Pick an amp (or a preamp model if you prefer), start tinkering, and leave the EQ till the end, and use it sparingly. EQ is for fine tuning your "platform" once you have it, but ifyou rely too heavily on it, it's super easy to ruin an otherwise good tone.

Variax has gone the way of the dodo... and if demand (or rather the lack thereof) is any indication, they ain't coming back. It's always been a niche product, albeit with a loyal cult following. The masses just aren't interested...

Lol... so because a new product release is not imminent, therefore everyone at L6 has been just sitting around with their thumbs up their a$$es? That's fascinating logic. To conclude that because nothing new is available today, therefore L6 has abandoned the market to their competitors, is truly astonishing...it's also ridiculous, juvenile, and short-sighted, but I digress. Just for my own morbid curiosity though, do you have a similar reaction when the supermarket runs out of broccoli? SPOILER ALERT: It's not because all the farmers decided to play in the dirt instead of growing $hit. Helix was in development for years prior to it's release... do you think somebody just snaps their fingers and a product magically hits the shelves? Hell, beta testing alone takes months, and that's not even the hard part. Ask some of L6 guys over on TGP if you like, and they'll tell you the same. Just because they're not inviting you to the R&D meetings or screaming about a Helix successor from the rooftops, doesn't mean they don't have anything in the pipeline. Whatever is coming next has likely been in development for quite some time already. It's a crying shame we can't all just pitch a fit and have everything we want miraculously appear, but life's rough. In through the nose, out through the mouth, nice and slow. Everything's gonna be OK... ;)

The Helix platform is nearly a decade old... and I could be wrong, but I'd say the odds of any significant overhauls like those you're suggesting will not be forthcoming at this point. Any major UI or functionality changes will likely be reserved for whatever the next flagship device(s) will be. No matter how good something was when it was "the next big thing", continuing to spend resources duct taping endless upgrades to it just doesn't make sense... at some point you're putting a silk hat on a pig.

Harrumph! We really need either a soapbox, or an "I'm outta here"/ angry storm-off emoji around here. It would save so much space. ;)

Given that all the Variax stuff has been discontinued, you could spend the rest of your days searching for the OEM springs and never find them... fortunately, these things are pretty universal. Any springs for similar bridge saddles should suffice.

With any floating bridge if you want to avoid these kind of issues, it's best to change strings one at a time so that most of the tension is still maintained on the springs. With what you've done already, your intonation is likely out of whack... if you're not familiar with basic guitar set-ups, take it to someone who is... from your description there three things are pretty much certain at this juncture: 1) Multiple things probably need adjusting at this point, 2)Trying to describe it all in here will take forever, and 3) If you don't know what you're doing, you're gonna make things worse.

This should be stamped on the outside of the box... it would save some folks a bunch of money, and countless repetitive forum discussions. ;)