First off FL Studio does support DirectX. You can forget about automation though.

Evil G, DirectX is not going to go anywhere... It's the primary API used in PC games/ multimedia programming, and whilst magor plugin developers are probably going to prefer to support VST2 since it's the main API they're not going to through away the ACID/ Sound Forge etc. camp. Let's not forget that things are still appearing for RTAS, and that's Protools only.

If your host doesn't support VST you can get wrappers that will (at the cost of some CPU cycles) automagically convert a VST to a DirectX plugin, or the other way around.

About time you downloaded the latest copy from ImageLine mate.