Recording a solo over a looped section in SONAR Professional

I've just upgraded to SONAR Professional from 8.5 and also updated my PC from Windows 7 to 10.  Using a Focusrite 18i8 USB.
 
One thing I do in the heat of creativity is to select a section of some track I've laid down, set that to loop, then record another track doing a solo or something.  So yesterday I tried this and wound up with 17 8-bar takes stacked on top of each other.  What I would have done in previous versions would be to copy/paste the looped section to the length I really wanted it and then try to reassemble the clips into something resembling my solo "performance" so I could either save some ideas to do it again, or if it was good enough, comp those sections together for the final bit.
 
This does not seem to be a supported or easy thing to do in SONAR as the loop recording modes seem to expect that whatever you looped was in fact how long you wanted the end result to be, and there's no easy way to reassemble a stack of clips recorded over a loop back into a linear bit.  OK, I can accept that, even though stopping to copy/paste stuff out seriously interrupts my creative (music playing) flow.
 
However I think I have either discovered a bug or don't understand some setting which is making the following happen.
 
When I went to move the last take out to the right, it appears to be missing the first 1/8th note worth of audio.  So when I went to butt take 16 up to take 17, there was a 1/8th note gap at the beginning of take 17.  Then all the 1/8th note sections of each loop were stacked in their respective positions at the start of the looped section, but I don't recall splitting the first 1/8th note off of each clip.  Disaster!
 
So, two questions.
 
1) Is the workflow I have described possible in SONAR?  What would really be great is:
a) Select "n" bars for looping.
b) Record n * x bars of a solo on a new track.
c) Easily extend the looped section "x" times starting at its current position.
d) Unroll the clipped solo back to one contiguous section of audio.
 
2) Anyone else seen this phenomenon where the first little bit of each take is split off, making reassembly really difficult?
 
I'm willing to believe I did something stupid, but the above describes the way I often work.

Thanks for the note about speed comping, I'll check that out.
 
I tried it again on a new project to make sure I wasn't hallucinating.  All of the earlier takes get split at the point I stop the recording.  I just did a 4-bar loop and recorded 3 takes, stopping at about beat 2 + 1/16.  So take 3 stops at beat 2 + 1/16 and takes 1 and 2 are split at beat 2 + 1/16.
 
If I "undo" then the entire recording disappears, so it doesn't look like this "split all takes at the point where I stopped" was something I did.  I would call this a bug unless someone can point out why I would ever want to do this and how to make it stop.
 
Ok, I chose to store takes in successive tracks and it does not split the earlier takes.  So I'll do that from here on out.

To answer your question, I just had it at the default which just overlaps all takes on one track.  Probably not the most efficient way to do this, but I'm pretty sure I used to do it that way in 8.5 or earlier.  I'm not sure what the rationale is for splitting all earlier takes at the stop point, but I can avoid this going forward by using take lanes and/or recording each take on a new track.
 
Thanks!