Some new ideas about SONAR for macOS.

I know it may be too late since Cakewalk now officially gave up their efforts due to their recent efforts wasted on emulation (but not the native development of the macOS version of SONAR). However, I guess that my idea may be helpful here.
 
Please think of making the Cakewalk SONAR Home Studio into an open-source software*, allowing volunteer developers to develop the native version of SONAR for macOS. This could be an experimental first step at this moment.
 
* For the open-sourced release it could have no factory plugins or samples but just the DAW application itself.

Blender was "freed" by tons of people donating to buy the source and release it.

BobF
Blender was "freed" by tons of people donating to buy the source and release it.

After all these years Open Source exists, some people still do not understand that it COST THE SAME MONEY TO DEVELOP as commercial software (when comparable in quality) and someone has to pay that...
Sometimes that are developers (open source "fanatic fundamentalists" like original GNU stack, government throw universities or simply because of failure in marketing), sometimes companies do that for several reasons, donators are at the very end of the list (quality software development is very expensive).
 

slartabartfast
My reading of the recent Cakewalk port is that it was not emulation, but rather an attempt to translate Windows code into native Mac OS code using an automated system, and then clean up the code manually where the robot work was not working. Emulation would imply that the Windows code was still running behind some kind of intermediate software.

You can get an idea what it is reading about WineHQ. It is a kind of emulation, not source code translation. The intermediate layer implement calls usual for one platform (in this case Windows) using calls on other platform (in this case OS X). That can be done "dynamically" (that is how you can run original Sonar X3 on Linux and I guess on OS X as well) or "statically" (I guess the Alpha is done this way). In both case since the implementation of Windows is not real Windows, that intermediate layer should be tweaked when something goes wrong. CodeWavers make it more and more "like" Windows, but MS continue the development and they are always behind... XP API is almost perfect now (so any program which works under XP works under the emulator), but more modern API versions still have many halls.