If I am just working with scratch tracks during the writing phase I discovered that simply turning my audio clips into Groove Clips worked perfectly fine for not so drastic tempo changes. In the early phases of the project I have been working on (for far too long now) I had started at 180 BPM. It had a MIDI drum track, my scratch guitar tracks and I think an early bass track. It was dragging a little but I didn't want to retrack the outline based on the new tempo because I was sure that that was goign to be the final arrangement (it wasn't). IIRC I did a quick bounce/comp of the audio clips so I'd be working with full takes (instead of the composite clips) and simply did the right click > Groove Clip Looping (or whatever it is called) and made my tempo change from 180 to 190 and bingo bango... success! I made sure to render the tracks after I was happy that the new tempo worked and have been building the project around those prelim tracks ever since (although they are long archived in favor of final tracks).
However if I were to do this on FINAL tracks that have wild fluctuations (which I will have to do a lot of on an old album I need to fix) I would use other, more high quality methods such as the Timing Tool method, Audiosnap, the Loop Constructor or a combination of all three (and whatever other techniques I stumble across).
I however did not notice ANY noticeable artifacts or quality degradation simply using the Groove Clip/render method I described earlier. Very VERY powerful tools and plenty of ways to skin this particular cat. They just require a bit of brainwork.
I completely concur that these things all seem extremely intimidating until you actually do them. With a bit of studying behind you and some patience it's really quite easy to accomplish some CRAZY warping stuff. When I bought Sonar I didn't even know this type of thing was even possible.
Also, I posted that thread about Craig Anderton's X1 Advanced Workshop series. He goes into great detail about using the Loop Constructor to do all sorts of stuff. In particular, and probably the most useful of all the Looping and Warping chapter in the first vid is the one about getting into the Loop Constructor to ensure your clips a) have enough split points for quality stretching and b) how to create user defined splits for extremely PRECISE and ultra high quality stretching. Most of the time though just getting into the Loop Construction view and simply upping the split control to add more splits will work (like if you set the Splits setting from splitting at every 8th note to every 16th note the quality of the stretching will go up).
Cheers... and congrats Mettulus. I'm getting ready to do some tests with LC and the other warping possibilities to gain experience with it all. As I said I have an entire album that needs to be corrected and I want to be fluent in ALL the tools I have at my disposal. It is a very important project to me and I don't want to screw it up.