I stay mostly quiet here even though I have been around since Cakewalk Pro Audio 2XL purchase in (I think) 2002.  People have loudly and sometimes quietly(in my case) hoped or screamed for many things.  Cakewalk of late since the Roland buyout have seemingly gone astray and turned a blind eye to the increasingly loud cries of their fanbase for change.
 
Come X3.
 
Just my take:  people screamed about take lanes, automation, stability, frequency of bugfixes, audio engine gapping, workflow issues, color customization, VST3.
 
I feel like whether anyone else has formally recognized it loudly or not:  Cakewalk have come through BIG TIME with this release.  
 
One of the chief complaints was lack of updates.  X2 for better or worse was an orphaned release.  One could potentially argue the same of X1.  With a corporate takeover, I hope people can cut them some slack but I can understand if they do not.  Here they've been out a few weeks and they are pitching the third patch.  These patches are rapid fire and they are meaningful and they are addressing real issues.  You can write of the "A" patch because a lot of what that entails are issues they knew about internally but didn't have time to implement between code freeze and rollout.  But we're going onto the "C" release in a few weeks.  Obviously the concerns about responsiveness and stability have hit home.  I am assuming we can expect to see X3F in this release at this rate if issues persist across the next 2-6 months.  Likewise, toward Gibson/Cakewalk:  YOU ARE DOING WELL RIGHT NOW: DO NOT MESS THIS UP AND STOP ISSUING FREQUENT PATCHES EVEN IF THEY LESSEN IN IMPACT until your customers stop having verifiable issues.  BEST possible scenario for Cakewalk and customers is if they issue a few more patches and then offer misc hotfixes for specific issues, even if those are in the same vein as the fast track hotfixes of the past few releases.  Seems to be after a few more official patches that further stabilize and deal with things, rather than withhold fixes from the X3 crowd and force upgrade folks to X4 with a new set of breakages, it would serve Cake's reputation and customer satisfaction to offer a few more hotfixes that are "untested and unsupported" for their customers who want to remain on X3 but fix things that are fixable without forcing an upgrade and potentially pissing off loyal fans by forcing them to adopt new buggy features to fix something.  There is always the tradeoff and especially for folks who make a living from their DAW the upgrades are risky.
 
About some of the enhancements that might have been unforeseen:
 
  - Gobbler:  GREAT IDEA.  perfect timing - cloud is perfect for offsite backups, but who wants to try to do this in carbonite when gobbler gets audio programs so much better?
  - Plugin arranging and detection enhancements
  - MIDI (and possibly audio) interface adjustments w/o restarting
  - Toasts to alert w/o intruding
 
Then there are the enhancements many would have expected, done fairly well out of the gate:
  - Comping / take lanes
  - VST3
  - Color customizations
 
The new features this time around have had an all around better feel to them, in terms of initial stability and quality.  *my impression* - does anyone strongly disagree?  The whole systems feels like it's gotten out of the way a bit more, and that's a great thing.
 
Glad that few are carping and most are praising - I think this release is in the right direction and the silence sucked leading up but given the takeover and the evident work that has gone into the new product - I applaud them.
 
Hats off, Cakewalk!
pete
 

>>I hope CW implement multi MIDI port input for VST3 virtual instruments 
Not for X3C - as I mentioned X3C has primarily bug fixes and a some workflow improvements. There is a new VST related MIDI feature though :)
However I met with the VSL product manager yesterday and we had a nice chat discussing VSL and SONAR. No schedule or promises though since its vaporware at this point. It seems straightforward but until some more analysis has been done I won't know for sure. VSL is definitely a very cool product.