It took me five days to authorize Sonar 8.5 because that's how long it took me to figure out what "run as administrator" meant. I mean, my Windows User Account says I am the administrator, and I ran the programme, right?
 That was five days of aggravation. At least I wasn't on a forum somewhere complaining about how stupid I was.(at least not as worstcaseontario, anyways).

worstcaseontario
I am not a professional Word operator. I am a professional machine and forklift operator, and I am good at it.

 
Word is a complex and sophisticated program designed to do all kinds of page layout and formatting functions. I'm decent at Word. But if I sat down at a forklift and had to ride herd on machinery in a plant, I'd probably run over people and destroy pallets. I wouldn't even know where to look for documentation on how to run a forklift, what kind of fuel it needs, etc. 
 
This is why I mentioned PDFs and the internet. Last week I had to edit a manual in Adobe InDesign, a hellishly complex program I had never used before. Its UI is totally unlike Word or any other program I'd used. I couldn't figure out how to add bullets, so I typed "add bullets in InDesign" into Google and I had an answer in seconds. Every time I couldn't figure something out, either InDesign's help or the net came to the rescue.
 
Think of your Outline issue from the perspective of a Word developer. Word has dozens of font effects. A good designer will consider what is needed most often, and make it most accessible. So, Bold and Italic will be front and center. Next would be font color, underline, and strikethrough...and so on. Outlining would come fairly far down on the list, so it's placed accordingly. 
 
With today's complex programs, and that includes DAWs, I don't think any company can make a program that's truly "intuitive." If someone can't find a feature in a program, the design of the program won't always be able to solve that problem...but the documentation can, if it's done well. For example ideally, you would simply type "outline fonts" in Word's search field, and you'd get the answer you want. It should not be necessary to read documentation in your spare time, but it should be essential that you find what you need when you have a question. I think Sonar is very good in that respect, by the way...between the online documentation, the net, and this forum, it's pretty easy to find answers.  
 

If a Microsoft Word developer came up to me while I was making my sign and said "Oh, I see you are using or product, might you have any suggestions for features we might add?". I will say " Yeah, you could make it so you can out line the letters of the text".

 
Actually, they did! I don't know which version of Word you're using, but in one version (I don't use Word much, I'm into OpenOffice but have to use Word at Gibson) Microsoft added a feature they called "the ribbon" across the top of the page. It groups functions into categories and actually makes it quite easy to find things. For example, the ribbon's Home tab has all the "common stuff," and fonts options are in the upper left. When I needed to outline something in yellow, I had no idea how to do it. But the font section had a picture of an outlined letter...aha! I clicked on it, and there were a bunch of outlining functions, one of which outlined in yellow. I selected the text, clicked on the "outlined in yellow" button, and...problem solved.
 
The last time I owned Word was when Macs were available only in black and white, and as you can imagine, a lot has changed since then and now. But "the ribbon" has saved my butt time after time, I can find almost anything I need without having to deal with the documentation. 
 
The takeaway from the focus group wasn't that people were stupid, the takeaway was that the program needed better paths to find the info you needed. I think the ribbon was a good step in that direction, so at least they're trying.

Have you ever looked at Ableton's preferences, Craig? Just off the top of my head those seem a lot easier to navigate. I agree that you can get a lot more specific in Sonar than what Ableton allows you to set but that could be an argument in favor of "advanced" buttons. Not to mention Ableton had never really failed to work right for me so perhaps there are some things it does automatically that just work.

My main issue is that there are so many different screens with settings that obviously belong together.

I like the idea of snapshots but that is, again, a solution for a problem that I'm not describing. It's like I'm saying I'm having trouble sleeping at night and you're saying "drink some coffee in the morning, it helps you wake up".

Sanderxpander
Have you ever looked at Ableton's preferences, Craig?

Yes, I wrote the manual for Live 2.0 and still use Live 8 for my onstage act (Live 9 is on my desktop). When people ask me the difference between Live and Sonar, I say that Live is a musical instrument disguised as software, while Sonar is a recording studio disguised as software.
 
The preference are good, except that trying to figure out interfaces with multiple ins and outs can be extremely frustrating. For example if an interface considers its master outs 1 and 2, but has additional separate inputs labeled 1, 2, 3, 4 etc., then Live will consider 1, 2, 3, and 4 as 3, 4, 5, and 6. That's tripped me up several times when working with interfaces that have lots of I/O (e.g., ADAT interfaces and such).

I agree, Craig, it would be nice if Live could report the names as specified by the audio driver like Sonar does. At the same time, I would like to specify in Sonar whether an input is available as stereo or as mono like I can in Ableton. My E-MU card is particularly annoying in this respect. But that's neither here nor there I guess.

I tried to reply to this thread ~#61, so the Live comment is reiterated above already. I couldn't post, so threw it in a text file for later...
 

worstcaseontario
[...] I can easily imagine somebody [...] sitting down with Sonar to "giv'r a try" and be put off immediately and permanently, then go on Gearslutz and KVR or whatever and spend more time there complaining about the experience than they spent trying to figure out the programme. [...]

 
This quote stands out to me more than anything else in this thread. I have often been concerned with someone entirely new sitting down with SONAR and the first "road block" is getting preferences set so that the desire to make sound... um... er... makes sound. We have all seen threads where "commonly set/changed" settings require multiple pages to be navigated (and know where they are). That initial hurdle is basically the "first impression" that also affects sales, so it is rather important to bear in mind.
 
As an example, when taking Berklee's "Introduction to Music Production" course, one assignment was to find the common I/O parameters in your DAW (I cannot recall them all; but a few were bit-depth, sample rate, driver mode, I/O connections, audio file type, buffers, etc.). Since I do not use other DAWs, it was an eye opener to see that some DAWs have all of these on one simple page (four DAWs were demonstrated in the video).
 
I have used Live Lite briefly (came with new hardware); and although it is not something I would use, I was initially impressed by how easily it "came online," and how all of the "big picture" options were right there.

After much thought, I've come up with a solution worthy of a "Feature Request". How about dedicate a small part of the internet to a forum dedicated to more experienced Sonar Users guiding and helping newer users around these things.( I hope the irony of that is not lost without smileys.) This forum would of course need moderation. Any takers?
Although the intent of my first post was kind of vague and searching, it's replies have given me one new perspective that led to a fantastic improvement to my workflow regarding multiple hardware configurations. This is about saving .INIs(gonna call them I&Is in my private life) and different project templates. That's not even what I was on about when I first posted. I forget what triggered the first post.
I am still kinda hoping for more wisdom about the history of the programme and how it might explain some -I dunno- quirks of the layout.