OK, interesting that a transient shaper could be used to appear to tame reverb but it would only apply to very percussive sounds I bet. Because what it would be doing is cutting the gain straight after a transient and in that situation it might work and sound similar. The quote you posted mentioned drum stems only, the transient shaper would not lower reverb over a whole mix, big difference.

But this plugin is doing something far different form that. It would be smart enough to know the difference between the direct sounds and the reverb sounds and lower one without lowering the other. So say you had some strings playing slowly but in a wet environment this plugin would probably have the skills to cut the reverb whereas your transient shaper concept would not. Hence the reason it is not cheap as well.

The Masterpiece is not something you use on individual tracks, (although you could I am sure) it is something you use over a whole mix and yes it can lower overall reverb of a whole mix. Hard to believe I know and it's all analog too which is even more amazing. It would still certainly stand up as one serious mastering device but I agree with you it is way too expensive ($14,400 for the full version with everything!) and much more can be had for that sort of money outlay including many plugins now that could go a long way to emulating perfectly many of the processors inside that unit. (it is all NEVE stuff BTW)

Unveil is MAC only at this stage but if you have got a Mac you might be able to trial a demo. Not sure how you would go comparing that to the Sonar transient shaper. Read the website in full describing it (Unveil) and you will get a better idea of what it does. Dereverberation and Signal Focus are the words they use. Pitchmap looks pretty cool too!

Another application I thought of where it might be really helpful is you might have track that you have recorded in a slightly live room. eg an acoustic guitar part. At the time you might have thought it was OK and you did not bother to record the closeup sound of the guitar. Later in the mix you might not like the sound of the ambience around it. Then you could use the plugin to remove the unwanted ambience and then use a nice convolution reverb with a much nicer and tighter space to replace the previous ambience and you would still have lots of control of the new ambience on top of that. Cool!