Yeah I can imagine that if you're just starting out then Reaper's "bare bones" install is probably a little off putting when other DAW's are an all-in-one package. But over the years I've accumulated a pretty solid set of tools, including just about every kind of plugin effect available, countless sample libraries, a couple dozen synths, drum machines & sequencers, analysis tools and everything else. Plus I have an Adobe subscription and can use Audition if I need to do any kind of fine grained audio editing or processing. So a bare bones install is actually a plus.
After having used Sonar for years it's been great to discover that there are better ways of doing things. The "one size fits all" track philosophy of Reaper is a real no-brainer - Bitwig has it as well. It makes you think, why would it be any other way? Bitwig is a really cool program as well, it's almost like a mini-Reaktor with a DAW built in. The sound design possibilities are endless, and it has some really useful features, like being able to set a track's waveform as the background for the piano roll so that you can line your notes up using an audio track as a visual guide - I believe Ableton and FL Studio has that as well.
I now believe that Sonar was just trying to be too many things at once and consequently never really excelled at any of them. I'd really love to see it come back with a lot of the chaff cut out, and streamlined into an exceptional audio-oriented DAW. Whenever I hear people say that Sonar is the greatest DAW hands down, it's usually people who use it to record and mix audio, they barely touch upon 30% of its features and never experience the awful problems with stability and bugs that heavier users experience. Get rid of the Matrix view, maybe even the step sequencer, forget about the notation view and everything else that only a tiny % of users cared about. I can't imagine how many expensive development hours were wasted by Cakewalk in upgrading and maintaining features that hardly anyone used.