MPE exists, and can handle microtuning of pitch. MIDI 2.0 supports per-note pitch bend. Old multitimbral MIDI synths can be used in an MPE-like fashion by using the one-note-per-channel and pitch bend trick. Modular synthesizers (and virtual modular synthesizers like VCVRack) use control voltage directly, which has no built-in assumptions about how or if the voltages are quantized.
Microtonal music, or even just plain regular traditional music that's tempered to be more in tune with itself, should be trivially easy to do with electronic instruments, and yet due to some historical decisions to base the one near-universal music protocol we've been using for the last 40 years on a piano-centric representation, it's a lot harder than it ought to be.
I think we should not disregard microtonal music just because it isn't cleanly backwards compatible with a protocol that's over 40 years old.
I don't know what all the options are, but MTS-ESP is one. If I understand it right, it's a sort of out-of-band channel where you can apply tuning tables to all the MIDI synths that use the MTS-ESP API from one place.
I think it's not sent over MIDI so it only works if everything is running on the same computer.
Microtonal music, or even just plain regular traditional music that's tempered to be more in tune with itself, should be trivially easy to do with electronic instruments, and yet due to some historical decisions to base the one near-universal music protocol we've been using for the last 40 years on a piano-centric representation, it's a lot harder than it ought to be.
I think we should not disregard microtonal music just because it isn't cleanly backwards compatible with a protocol that's over 40 years old.