One of many reasons why I love Cakewalk..

Yep,  I totally understand.  I've been slaving away on "Cake" for years and have had to dabble in Protools the same amount of time because of clients.  My favorite was when Protools jumped up to 64bit and when it became possible to render as fast as the computer would allow.  Sonar had been there for years.  I worked composing music on hour long projects and the mixers would have to sit for an hour to render a audio mix.  I could render my music tracks down in minutes and I had generally way more tracks.  Cake has as a rule been way ahead of the tech curve. 
 
Of course Ptools is more compatible with Avid editing systems and others are using Ptools to mix not compose,  but I am not convinced that Ptools has any long run advantages.  

I still maintain PT was the ultimate example of "getting in ahead of the competition and locking down the client base with big investments, dongles and hardware".. they had the professional world at gunpoint a.k.a. "Industry Standard" for years and got complacent in the process. But other DAW makers were hungry. Like the old Avis advert used to go.. "We try hard, because we're second best".