Necrobumping this because I'm bored and was searching around Project Sam stuff.
So, 3 years (really? holy shit) later, I ended up getting Orchestral Essentials 1. I like it and have had made use of it in some things, but haven't gotten too much further in my orchestration practice or using much more of it since (ironically because I'm too busy with music work).
The quality in a lot of what I've played with so far definitely fits the bill, though I've found some instruments weird to work with and with certain murky or scratchy qualities to them. The patches and multis aren't well-labeled to give you an idea of what you're going to get with them. I still seem to have some weird issue with Kontakt's sound quality overall where everything still sounds "smaller", "harder", and in some respects of more difficult quality than even the old EWQLSO with PLAY (the composer field would likely call me insane and put me down like Old Yeller if I argued that too much). So I still haven't figured out how to make Kontakt orchestral sets sound as good as the demo tracks and such offer.
That being said, what I especially like about this set is how low-resource demanding it seems to be. I've been keeping watch on newer orchestral sets and they are just getting way out of hand with size - hundreds and hundreds of GB and some patches that are more than a gigabyte themselves to load. You'll have to start doubling the costs of these orchestra libraries to include replacing the whole fucking computer for each one, which takes me out of the equation. ProjectSam's Orchestral Essentials doesn't do any of that. I can load some of what I need, of which OE has some easy-to-work-with strings, keyboards and even a lot of other sound design shit I wasn't expecting like hybrids and synthesizer pulsings, pretty quick on my years-old desktop.
Plus they occasionally update it with more stuff every so often! For free! I'm looking forward to a 1.3 if one ever comes out.
And Angel's right, they do post some not-bad video tutorials showing how to get more out of the libraries, so they take some good care of their paying customers. I probably would like to get OE2 the next time I have the money and opportunity to get it set up.