Arnd, Thank you for spending time here. I purchased StudioOne Pro last summer, mainly to collaborate with another artist. At that time, I wasn't particularly eager to split time with SONAR because I felt I got better results faster with SONAR.
Be that as it may, I was very impressed with how intuitive the most common operations are in StudioOne. I know that did not happen by accident. That is the result of planning and vision, and I commend you and your team for that. I also commend you for the concept of a specific mastering mode, rather than just encouraging people to throw some "mastering stuff" on the main mixing bus. What you did there makes very good sense to me. I had already invested in Ozone, and I believe I can achieve a higher quality result with Ozone (of course, I could use the Ozone plugs in the S1 mastering function.) I certainly have used your mastering section to assemble CDs.
Finally, I want to congratulate you and your team for being the first to really recognize the possibilities that can come from the convergence of DAW and notation. I view the current software as a first step that is not terribly useful as it exists today. However, if you can get to the point that a user can compose freely in MIDI and in notation, at liberty to move from one mode to the other and back again, this will be enormously powerful and will expand the potential DAW market to include a large number of people who compose in notation.
In short, I think you are headed in a good direction. Having said that, I am moving to Cubase as my main replacement for SONAR because I believe Cubase is considerably more advanced than S1 presently, e.g. in the chord support. And I really cannot consider Notion at this stage because it is not nearly up to the functional level of Finale, which I have used for ~ 20 years.
Things change. I don't see Finale keeping up, and expect to see them go the way of SONAR before too long. I hope Notion and S1 will continue to advance rapidly because we will need those solutions. And I am certainly not throwing away by S1 license. I will certainly use S1 as needed for collaborations, and I will probably choose S1 over Cubase on any project that is likely to need Molodyne.
I wish you and your team well. The work you are doing is recognized and appreciated.