Anderton
BeepsterMaybe a better option (for now... until the toolset can be expanded) is to get Craig and a bunch of Baker's with extensive mastering experience (or even tap outside sources and/or some of our forum members like Danny, Jeff and Bit) to sit down and create some good Mastering chains/presets/templates that cover a wide range of styles using the tools we have on hand.
I don't think that's possible. As I've said in so many workshops, there are what I call "Mastering with a capital M" (mission-critical mastering) and "mastering with a small m" (the example of mastering a daughter's piano recital or the audio coming off a camcorder). Something like LANDR has no problem doing the mastering stuff. But Mastering is about much more than processing, it's about making artistic decisions, which at least in my case often requires waveform-level editing. No preset can accommodate that, but that kind of detail is why people use professional mastering engineers.
As far as this LANDR thing... from what I'm gleaning all that's really been added here is some option to export and their upload tool? Anything else has to be paid for but we get maybe some limited "sample" formats of our mixes?
Read the eZine, and my post immediately prior to yours. LANDR will make my life as a professional mastering engineer easier, so of course I like it 
Right... but you get what I'm saying here about the chains being setup for general usage and logic behind them being explained a bit so us clowno gruntos who just want to add a bit of extra polish to our mixes can play around. right?
I've actually been trying to study all this quite a bit lately but as I'm sure you know the info out there is erratic at best and you'll pretty much NEVER find (aside from maybe a couple vids you've done in the distant past) tutorials using the included Sonar tools (or the addons).
The suggestion really is, and let's use yourself as an example, if you were forced to use Sonar Platinum and it's base package to master (small m) various styles of music how would you set up the chain (and then setup that chain in a Project Template or FX Chain)? How would you decide what parts of that chain needed to be applied (turned on) and adjusted based on things you are hearing from the raw mix?
If doods like you and others got commissioned to create these types of templates based on their own personal styles/comfort zones and wrote/created companion articles/vids to explain your own personal logic using the tools available I think it could actually help us aspiring "small m" mastering engineers get more out of the program than we can flitting about the intertubes at large trying to sort through all the not so useful/not so product specific intructional volumes.
The things I've been learning can be applied using a lot of the on board tools of course but it's a lot of effort and experimentation with a LOT of failures. I think if we had some good starting points with some good tutorial from trusted and proven engineers it could be quite valuable to many of us. Honestly I think this type of thing tossed into the occasional monthly releases/eZines would be far more beneficial and attractive to us kind of "intermediate" users just trying to toss up some decent sounding demos. I also do think that we CAN get quality output with the current tools as far as final polish BUT a bit of a helping hand from experienced pros familiar with said tools (and taking such minimalist approaches) is required to do so.
Knowaddimean? Seems like it could be a huge boon to the userbase without any real cost aside from maybe bribing the contributors to put these things together.
Ya... you know what I mean. You're really one of the very few whom I've seen even approach such materials and tool chains.
Cheers. I'll scuttle off to my dirty corner now. lol