Sonar is the best DAW period. Marketing and ..the community.. failed.

What's the point? Cakewalk is going under for a number of reasons. 
 
1. Macs own the DAW industry. Period. Always did. Always will. So it was impossible for Cakewalk to ever achieve a significant market share. And once these Mac-based DAWs became became available for Windows users, the battle was over. Every PC user wanted to jump on the ProTools bandwagon, leaving little room for Cakewalk to grow beyond its loyal customer base. 
 
2. ProTools, Cubase, Studio One, Ableton and other DAWs grew market share because they were packed with hardware such as audio interfaces. New DAW users got hooked to these programs and became loyal to those brands. For awhile a crippled version of Cakewalk was included with certain Roland products, but these efforts were abandoned. 
 
3. When Sonar first launched, DAWs were mainly for composers. But over time the looping fad took over, and people who had no musical background could create generic hip hop compositions by dragging and dropping loops and pretend they were playing songs by pushing colored buttons on an MPC device. Cakewalk could never compete with these "drag and button push" programs. 
 
4. The subscription model signaled the end.  Before it, you could update to the newest version of the top Sonar package for $99. That was affordable. But $199 a year for no more than one or two real updates a year was too much for many people (me included). 
 
5. The acquisition of Cakewalk by Gibon was the final nail in the coffin. Gibson knows nothing about software, and the head-scratching decision to make Cakewalk a Tascam subsidiary made absolutely no sense. And now that Gibson is on the verge of declaring banktruptcy, it's mothballing the assets that don't generate significant revenue. Since Cakewalk was never a priority for them, it's the first to go. 
 
So it's fine to go out there and say Cakewalk is the best, but you're essentially spitting into the wind. No one is going to buy software from a company going out of business, and unless another company or private equity group guys it out the brand is dead in terms of further releases.