Different DAWs

I've been a long time Cakewalk user (since the 90's) and all of my work has been done in Sonar. I don't know all the tricks, but I think I've got a pretty good handle on how to use it and get a good sound. Recently I've been exploring different DAWs, I guess it started when I got a copy of Pro Tools when I purchased an Eleven Rack. The Eleven came with PT10 so I installed it and looked at it for a while but continued to do all my work in Sonar. I played with Pro Tools a little at the time but never thoroughly explored it, I had work to get done. When I built my new monster computer, I didn't reinstall Pro Tools, it ran way too many drivers, and services plus I wanted to strip the box to bare bones for maximum performance.
 
I've done all kinds of music, from 80's to classic rock to 90's to 00's, lately I've been doing EDM, I try to stay open to anything that's interesting. I'm always looking things up and found that a lot of EDM people were using Ableton, so I got a copy of Live and played with it, I really liked the session view model (Sonar has a similar feature but it's not as well developed). The session view was an entirely different paradigm for me and the built in stuff sounded great. It was fun to play with it and create completely different songs and arrangements just by triggering clips in a different order. Live also can do some pretty amazing things with samples using the drum rack. There are some things like beat creation that Live excels at.
 
Recently, I discovered rewire so I thought I'd explore it. Being able to rewire Live into Sonar seemed pretty cool, but being a total gear freak and having a bad case of GAS, I had to have more, so I got a copy of Reason. I played with Reason mostly as a rewire slave, I thought the ability to combine multiple synths and processing in a rack and then control it from Sonar was pretty amazing. Sonar doesn't really have any equivalent to that functionality.
 
A couple weeks ago I was watching a video on a cool audio editing workflow using Pro Tools, so I got the upgrade to 11. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the bloat in 10 had been cleaned up. I've been wading through the manual and figuring out what I can do with it. One aspect of Pro Tools that annoyed me was that I couldn't use any of my favorite VSTi's. I have a lot of time invested in learning how to use Z3TA+ 2 and Sylenth and I would have missed them even though Massive supports AAX. That, and I have a couple boutique VSTi's that I use frequently. However, Pro Tools can be a rewire master.
 
I discovered that Live, while it could load VSTs in normal mode, didn't load them in rewire slave mode and Reason doesn't support VST's at all, bummer. Looking around, I found that Reaper can load VSTs when in slave mode so I got a copy and started using it as well. I was pretty amazed at how tiny it is, the installer is only 10MB, nothing's that small these days.
 
Now I have X3, Pro Tools, Live, Reason, and Reaper. I've discovered that they all have respective strengths and weaknesses.
My impressions are:
Sonar is best for MIDI sequencing, audio recording and mixdown, I especially like the bounce to tracks feature. It pretty much nails the mix from tape model, much better than any other DAW I've used. I normally compose MIDI using the score editor, unfortunately that feature needs a bit of TLC. Sonar is a rewire master only so it's a main DAW.
Pro Tools is best for audio editing, the Elastic Audio stuff is solid and the different modes work well for beat slicing. There really is no equivalent functionality in Sonar that works as well. I haven't done a lot of mixes in PT, but everyone else on the planet has, I'm sure it's no slouch. It is annoying that you can't turn off input monitoring on record but that can be worked around. Pro Tools is a rewire master only so it's also a main DAW.
Live is best for dealing with loops, beats, and samples. You can do a lot of stuff in Live that you can't do anywhere else (split audio to samples and put them in a drum rack, brilliant). It's much more oriented towards musical creativity. Audio editing is a bit more limited and Live only has a piano roll MIDI editor but it's incredibly easy to use. Live can either be a rewire master or slave so it can either be a main DAW or a secondary DAW.
Reason is best for sound design with its rack model, I don't think any other DAW has the ability to combine multiple synths, effects, etc without resorting to subs. Reason doesn't load VSTs so you have to use their synths or 3rdParty rack extensions. Reason can either be a rewire master or slave like Live.
Reaper is the Swiss army knife of DAWs. I think Reapers strong points are that it's small and it lets you hook anything up to anything else, solid and tight with no frills. Infinitely tweakable. Reaper can either be a rewire master or slave like Live and Reason.
 
I think the tool you should use depends on what you want to do. It's useful to know the strengths and weaknesses of various DAWs to choose which one you want to use for a given task. It's cool to be able to hook a bunch of them together into FrankenDAW. When you build a monster, I guess that's what you get :)
 

If Pro Tools had track layers I'd have to find a new forum.

I think the colors are no good for looking at all day long but nothing compares to my SONAR 8.5 eye saver lay out.

Sent from android... pardon the mess