chuckebaby
It seems like the general consensus is the same and reminds me of a good comparison.....
 
Don't give out Happy meals with a Pilots license as the toy. 

This is hilarious! Great one! 

Just to play Devil's advocate (and hbarton, I'm not picking on you specifically).
 
If it is a profession, and only professionals should get the tools, then I should then have no business purchasing SPLAT.  A year ago, I had zero experience with recording.  I couldn't tell you what DAW meant, let alone what midi, comping, or routing was.  Was I then just to amuse myself with an IPad app?  
 
No, it is something that I wanted to learn; over the last year, it has been a struggle.  I've gone through Groove 3 videos, read countless pages of the manual, and posted here more times than I should.  It is by decent documentation, a good amount of patience, and most importantly the charity of those on those on this board that I have learned what I have thus far.  My biggest struggle has not been with the technology, but with the terminology.  IMHO, DAW makers can't do much to help complete newbies.  First, one has to be willing to take the time to learn.  Much of DAWs and recording are still a great mystery to me, but one has to start somewhere.  One of those ancient Chinese philosophers said that "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."  That step for me was breaking out my credit card and buying Splat with lifetime updates.  Looking back, it was a good decision.
 
   

We can congratulate ourselves for being smarter and more professional than other people because we "do it the hard way" so to speak.  I would point out that even though endeavors like flying a multi-engine commercial aircraft and performing heart surgery also require smart practitioners, these practitioners are getting better and better tools every month.
 
If a person is performing heart surgery on me, I really don't want them to have to stop in the middle of the operation to RTFM.  I want their tools to take on as much of the tedium and routine tasks as possible.  And I think that was the spirit of the original question.
 
I am particularly enjoying the new Ozone.  It has several new features that make it significantly easier and quicker to get the master "into the neighborhood" before doing fine tuning.  Maybe some folks are so good at this kind of thing that they don't think they can benefit from such advancements, but I will take any tool that gets me closer to my goal with the minimum of effort.

It seems that this place has become a club for angry old men. 

cparmerlee
 
I would point out that even though endeavors like flying a multi-engine commercial aircraft and performing heart surgery also require smart practitioners, these practitioners are getting better and better tools every month.

And to your point, modern commercial aircraft mostly have "glass cockpits" (flat screen instrument panels) now, and are capable of taking off and landing by themselves.
 
The captain is responsible for the flight, but has become more of a "flight manager" than a pilot.  He enters the flight plan into the computer and communicates with the air traffic controllers.

I think it's important not to confuse the tool with the art. Creating an incredible work of art will never be easy, but having tools that don't get in the way of being an artist is  doable. We are in the first baby steps of computer-based recording, and something like Ozone is a baby step as well. Neutron has no artistic intelligence, it just force-fits what you do into something it thinks is probably better than what you'll come up with by yourself. 
 
Artificial intelligence has not really been applied to what we do, nor have voice commands. Once a machine learns how you work, things will change.
 
By easier to use, I don't mean so much "easier to make art" but easier to, for example, have the DAW talk to the interface so that setup is automatic. Also something like the Help module had potential, but I suspect it's another one of those things that won't take the next step. For example instead of having to search for topics in the documentation, the machine should be aware of what you're doing, and thus be able to anticipate what you need to find out about.
 
It should also be able to anticipate other functions based on what's happened in the past. As just one example - right now, to have a loop transpose, we need to place a transposition marker every time a transposition needs to happen. If you brought a loop into a project, and there was already a MIDI bass or keyboard part, there could be a pop-up that says "Should loops transpose based on the keyboard part's chord progression?" because it would already know what the chord progression was...that sort of thing. 
 
I think there will be ways to make all this happen more easily. Remember, with computers you used to have to tell the computer what to do with punch cards. Then came toggle switches and LEDs, then came QWERTY keyboards and monitors, and now we have graphical user interfaces. I can't imaging how difficult it would be to insert a plug-in using punch cards 

Anderton
 
I think there will be ways to make all this happen more easily. Remember, with computers you used to have to tell the computer what to do with punch cards. Then came toggle switches and LEDs, then came QWERTY keyboards and monitors, and now we have graphical user interfaces. I can't imaging how difficult it would be to insert a plug-in using punch cards 

I wrote my first Cobol program on a deck of punch cards.  What a PITA that was, compared to running a Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on your PC today.
 
In school, we were not allowed to use calculators on tests, but could only use a slide rule, or pencil and paper.  But today you wouldn't think of sending a kid off to college without the latest laptop.
 
Tools change.  Usually for the better! 

It has been mentioned numerous times above that while it made good sense 20 years ago for the emerging DAW platforms to adopt a look and feel reminiscent of a traditional recording studio, that makes much less sense now, considering that most of the future customers will never have ever set foot inside a traditional studio.
 
While we are all comfortable with the look and feel of DAWs -- and frankly they all look almost exactly the same -- I would suggest that at any moment, 95% of what is on the screen is not needed and amounts to clutter.  The problem is that all those little buttons and widgets are needed SOMETIMES, so they sit there looking at us.
 
I can imagine a new view of the DAW that is highly graphical, such as in Bidule.  The initial view would show each track or bus as a node, and would have a visual map of all the connections.  To see detail for each entity, you could fly over with the mouse or touch on the screen.  As music is playing, perhaps there could be visual ways to call attention to the most active tracks, including a red glow for anything that is clipping.  The most active nodes could bring themselves to the foreground.  Of course, you could drill down to any of the detail we have today, but it wouldn't necessarily be on the main work surface.

cparmerlee
I can imagine a new view of the DAW that is highly graphical, such as in Bidule.  The initial view would show each track or bus as a node, and would have a visual map of all the connections.  To see detail for each entity, you could fly over with the mouse or touch on the screen.  As music is playing, perhaps there could be visual ways to call attention to the most active tracks, including a red glow for anything that is clipping.  The most active nodes could bring themselves to the foreground.  Of course, you could drill down to any of the detail we have today, but it wouldn't necessarily be on the main work surface.

This sounds really cool actually.  Kind of like how some of the new Reaktor Modules are built and displayed.

cparmerlee
It has been mentioned numerous times above that while it made good sense 20 years ago for the emerging DAW platforms to adopt a look and feel reminiscent of a traditional recording studio, that makes much less sense now, considering that most of the future customers will never have ever set foot inside a traditional studio.

+1,000.