Have a question about what synth - soft or hard - you should buy? Ask here! At least give us an idea about what kind of music you want to make and an inkling of how you want to do it.
I am just getting back into synthesizers (been 30 years) and am eyeing an Arturia Keylab Essential 49/61 as the price is right and it comes with many synths and other instruments plus effects and everything you need. The advantage here is that the 9 knobs and 9 sliders all automatically map to the most common settings in whatever instrument you select. It is not perfect as a hardware synth as they have way more knobs and such, but this method still gives you 18 controls which is more than enough for most instruments and the ones you hardly ever touch are a mouse click away or can be manually assigned to a knob. There are other keyboards that do this too and even better like the Komplete Kontrol, but they are more money and aimed at more professional users it seems.
That catch with the Essential keyboard is that the synths only allow your to tweak the top 9-18 settings. If you want more control, you have to upgrade the software to really be able to get under the hood with each synth, which apparently is cheaper once you are in the eco system and upgrade/wait for sales (like right now). The software is called _analog V.
This keyboard allows you to have a full virtual studio and some hardware synth like control.
I’ve got a Keystep 37 and a Microfreak. Arturia makes good things. I don’t know about their bigger MIDI controllers, but I imagine they’re also good. I also don’t use plugins (at least very few), so I can’t speak to the quality of those, but Arturia seems to be pretty commonly regarded as one of the best in that regard. I always hear people raving about Pigments and their emulations of older hardware.