subtlearts
Love this thread. Yeah it's one of the things (from a fairly long list) that led me to finally realize it's the right Daw for me to transition to at this point. I like that they don't give a crap about marketing, or special crossgrade offers, or Insane Deals, or mountains of bundled content. I like that they are confident enough in their product to say hey, here it is, we think it's awesome and fairly priced, check it out as long as you want, we figure you'll think it's awesome too... eventually... Well, I did anyway.

I think the fact that they don't bother with all that other stuff at all is directly related to how fast they can move on the stuff that matters. I wish more companies would operate that way.

The bundling of things was one of the reasons I moved away from Sonar. When hard drive space was still at a premium, I remember installing Sonar 3, which was the first one to have a DVD in the box, and having to remove stuff I liked from my hard drive, to make the required space available that the installer said I needed.
 
After the installation, I found that I had a ton of crap that I neither wanted nor needed on my HD, and was not real happy about it. Add to that, one of the bugs I had made Cake aware of, but never could find a recipe to create on demand, happened to me within a few days. I remember thinking that they should concentrate on the DAW, and not be creating new snazzy named plugins, and globbing on tons of junk just so they could say, "includes over 500 jigabytes of content".
 
Reminds me of the Ginsu knives commercials. How much would you pay for this lovely DAW software?
Don't answer!
You also get a 5 petabytes set of urban street beet loopz and 50 FX with names that all end with the number 64!!!
NOW how much would you pay???
 
I was instantly wowed by the business model that REAPER was founded on, and then later I found out that it was from the same software coder and same business model who made Winamp, which I STILL use on a daily basis!
 
Just moments ago I played a few songs that a friend of mine, who actually wrote the book on how to use the E-Bow and demos it at all the NAMM shows, sent me. Hehe, one of the file he sent me was an E-Bow Concerto with ten tracks of E-Bow guitars. Anyway, REAPER is all about the core DAW, and nothing about snazzy plugins, loopz, beetz, 3rd party content, high paid marketing departments, ETC.
 
The guy who originally coded REAPER 12 years ago in 2005 is still coding it, and one of the reasons they are so agile at implementing new features. He knows the code inside and out, and frequently makes BIG changes in days or weeks, where other software developers take months, years, or just string their gullible customer base on indefinitely,  knowing all they need to say is "notation is not dead, we are still looking into that" after ten years of complete inaction.