11Dreams
Try it! its a scaled down Sonar... this is a fast review...
If this were a Cubase, Pro Tools, or Studio One forum, and the DAW of affection had just been Gibsoned, I can see members making exactly the same statement in regard to their favorite DAW (except for Pro Tools, where members who tried it would probably call Mixcraft a "scaled-up" version). I think this kind of reaction to Mixcraft is mostly psychological. All linear DAWs share more features than they exclude. What Mixcraft does, better than any other platform, IMO, is make all of those shared features much more intuitive. If you have used another DAW, you know what you are trying to do. When you open Mixcraft, your brain makes guesses as to how to make it do what you want, and probably more than 90% of the time, your brain's first guess is correct. This, is what yields the illusion of DAW scaling. For bread and butter tasks like laying down VSTi tracks, audio tracks, assembling clips, and editing MIDI or audio tracks, RTFM is, simply, not required for most people. It wasn't until Mixcraft 7 that I ever even looked at the manual, and that was only as a guide for using some of the newer features of that release (the fact that Acoustica provided a full hard-copy manual with the Pro version of 7, is probably why I even bothered looking there in the first place). Mixcraft has even been an innovator in providing useful features in its interface. For example, Mixcraft had refined "Musical Typing" on a QWERTY keyboard three years before it appeared in Sonar, it out ACIDed ACID for track envelope drawing at least from Version 3 (the first I tried, and at about the same time ACID 7 was starting to behave like a DAW), and, since it is primarily a DAW and not a video NLE, it has continually out VEGASed VEGAS in providing a way to score complex musical tracks for video, something that it does better than probably any DAW other than Digital Performer.
Mixcraft isn't Sonar, nor is it any other high-end DAW. Mixcraft is, well..., Mixcraft, and there is a lot to love about it. I suggest that skeptics heed 11Dreams advice and just "Try it!"