Piotr
Alexey, I am afraid there is a little misunderstanding here.
Yes, it seems so
There is defined procedure in Sonar documentation how you can do such conversion in a few and very painful and time consuming steps. But why we have computers? Why I cannot just change one number and Sonar would do rest? It is all about workflow.
About Reaper's bugs I cannot say anything.
I was not mentioning real bugs in Reaper. Just sample rate related behavior which can be perceived like bugs.
When a DAW support sample rate changing (so one number changing operation), it can not use "a sample" as absolute not changeable reference, it has to use something else. In REAPER that "else" is project time. But time is continuous, and so everything positioned can (and in fact will be) between samples. Including beats/measures, clip start/end, samples in different clips simultaneous clips (on different tracks or even on the same).
But Digital Audio does not work continuously, for audition/rendering/processing it is sample quantized. So the engine somehow should convert all that "micro shifts" and there is no universal way to do this without consequences.
I mean the fact Sonar does not support project rate changing has advantages.
About conversion if I am not wrong S1 has also such possibilities. Not only reaper. But I do not understand your point. Don't you like work faster and not waste time for tedious work? :(
Sure REAPER is not the only DAW with changeable samples rate. But it is the only one with this feature which you can install withing 5 minutes (including downloading) and restless un-install by deleting one folder (in case of "portable" installation).
Also REAPER is the only DAW which can try to open your Sonar project (since I am the only one who has eve tried to convert complete projects between DAWS). That does not always works and not everything is converted, but something is better then nothing.
Of course plugins are external code run by DAW. Like little external program. All bugs in plugins are of course not fault of DAW. But DAW should not let plugin to be crashed by it. This is what I believe can be improved in Sonar.
While VSTs are "external code", by default they are executed inside the DAW process (in any DAW). In this case, nothing can prevent them to kill the DAW.
Some DAWs (surprise... REAPER) support sandboxing plug-in in a separate process. In that case plug-in crash can not kill the DAW. But that waste significant amount of resources, and so primary used for debugging plug-in problems or bit bridging, not for "normal" setup.