At this point, I'm pretty sure it's just Varispeed I'm missing.

I was working on a project last night that I started on my Macbook while away from the studio, where I use Reaper for quick and dirty stuff. 

By far my biggest love of Reaper is their varispeed and play rate manipulation. As it happened, this project made liberal use of it, emulating defective old-school radio/tape. 

When I got home I decided to stay within Reaper for ease of use and banged the thing out pretty quickly. Things I liked: automating the master play rate for a quick and elegant solution to the "spin down" effect everyone always asks for on here (and gets referred to a third party solution). The ability to alter the play rate PER CLIP. Ripple editing (toggled where appropriate).

I kept wanting to port over to SONAR to use my fave plugz for this stuff (the VX64, Vintage Channel, and Transient plug all called to me but I had to resist because they're SONAR only), but the other tools made this lickety split.

Things I didn't like: well, it's Reaper. Some stuff is super fast and intuitive and some stuff is arcane and buried in menus. Default tool behaviors take a while to get used to. I sometimes get inconsistent waveform draws (like, totally inaccurate). The routing matrix is a tedious thing to look at. Powerful, but tedious. The take system and render in place functions are a little clunky.

Really, overall it was a good experience but if varispeed and play rate manipulation were added to SONAR I wouldn't even have needed to use another tool. 

Since I was working on an actual project and had reasons to move beyond the initial "WTF" moments when something was odd I found some great ideas and functionality, I'm just reporting back what I found to be good to share with the rest of the class: VARISPEED! (and, as it turns out, Ripple Editing)

absolutely!

It's amazing how much better Sonar is in so many ways- except BASIC RECORDING. Fairly significant oversight...

yeah- couldn't agree more. Right on.

I just spent some time on Youtube trying to find a good example of PT's method. I've heard it lauded before and I wanted to see how they do it. I couldn't find a good example.

Can you briefly describe the way PT handles it ?

Can you briefly describe the way PT handles it ?

Keywords would be 'playlists' and 'edit groups'.  Try this SOS article for playlists: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul05/articles/protoolsworkshop.htm  and this video for edit groups: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysq4FvpwmeU although the video doesn't really go into the awesome power of that fully operational battlestation.  It was the best I could come up with in a 2 second search.

I kinda think that having a true multitrack track type might work. Like we have mono and stereo tracks, why not an arbitrary channel track? (Reaper has this, I think). Then all the nice layer and comping features of Sonar could be applied to that one multichannel track.

Sonar's selection groups frustrate me big time. They're just too fiddly. You have to select, then edit--or deselect then edit an individual piece in the group. I'm always doing the unintentional thing with selection groups. They're nice, but you have to be careful with them, and they could be much more user friendly.  Like not being selection groups, but edit groups.  Sonar's composite clips in folders are pretty much the same.

Sonar's group clips across tracks is nice, but again they end up as selection groups with the problems I mentioned above. Plus there's no easy way to comp from multiple takes from those groups.  This is where ProTools Playlists shine.

I do two choral concert recordings a year with a 6 mic setup. I have to edit the long pauses between numbers as well as some basic editing from multiple takes--the director always has us stay after the show to re-record the rough spots while we're all set up. One of these days I'll have to do a video of that comparing Sonar to ProTools to really demonstrate how frustrating Sonar is in this scenario.