DAW Search: Key SONAR Features that Other Candidates Lack

Right now I'm working on a large audio book project and none of the candidates come close to the ease of editing that I find in Sonar. I have to take out breath noises, mistakes and such from a long wave file and nothing is as easy as Sonar. Some of the others make it absolutely painful to do this.
 
Every DAW I've looked at does something better than Sonar and they all fail to do something as well as Sonar.

Magic Russ
 I am also surprised how many don't natively support REX (Bitwig in particular came as a surprise).

Yeah I was surprised by that as well. A thread I read about it seemed to think that it might have something to do with them maintaining parity across Windows, OSX and Linux versions, and there is no support for rex files on Linux. 
 
Having said that, I use Geist a lot and most of my useage of rex files happens in that, so I'm not too worried about it (should I decide to adopt Bitwig as my next DAW). 

but which are actually "indispensable"?

pwalpwal
but which are actually "indispensable"?

I have changed that to "Key" features, if it makes you feel better.

sharke

mettelus
Geist is a good solution for the rex file and step sequencer woes. It is a great VSTi that can be hosted in your DAW of choice. Stand alone it is a DAW unto itself for the things that it does.

As long as you have Geist 1. Boy is Geist 2 a turkey. Full of bugs, terrible design decisions and they appear to have put the brakes on development. Well that's $99 I'll never get back.....

Glad i never made leap to upgrade. Lack of step sequencer doesn't bother me in srudio one since it is very easy to use prv in a simlar fashion.

Correction to the OP, Samplitude does have the ability to create a tempo map from an audio file. Two methods come to mind (but there are others, I believe):
 
1) With audio in a track, right click and open the "Remix Agent..." near the bottom. This opens a dialog box to allow you to adjust tempo map (set start marker, yada yada), and even use tap tempo to insert markers playing back the clip.
 
2) (My preferred, since it is the equivalent of SONAR's "Set Measure/Beat at Time Now.") In the Marker timeline is an option from that drop down (yes, that itty bitty "marker menu") - "Tempo Marker->Set Grid Position Marker" This is unassigned by default (I assigned mine to Shift-M same as SONAR) but can be set to whatever, and defaults to the closest beat (without the popup dialog that SONAR does).
 
General comment about tempo maps for where this would apply (best for covers or where the entire project must be set from the track(s)). This method is convenient regardless of DAW so long as 1) they import tempo maps with MIDI files and 2) you have a Melodyne version that exports MIDI (not sure which ones do not have this?). Open the track in Melodyne stand alone and export a MIDI file (or Tempo file in M4), then import that into [whatever DAW] to set the tempo map, then import the wav used in Melodyne. This "workaround" has been available even without drag/drop to the tempo track provided the export condition of Melodyne is met.
 
Edited for typo.

bitflipper
I haven't seen SONAR's dim solo feature on any other DAWs yet.
I haven't seen SONAR's track peak markers in any other DAW yet.

Reaper.