Whew, I'm two weeks late to this. Longtime Cakewalk user, longtime forum lurker, got wind of the acquisition two weeks ago and actually didn't realize the Cakewalk forums had been up so I missed all this as it was going down; I got off the phone with BandLab yesterday which pointed me to this thread and spent a good amount of time reading through it.
Officially, our company had 'moved on' to Cubase while maintaining a SONAR installation for backwards compatibility with old client projects. In reality, we've been using a 2015 update and it never was an opportune moment to update despite lifetime just because of one big project or another and Cakewalk admittedly has been finicky in some versions so we adopted a 'if it's not broke don't fix it' mentality. So while the updates seemingly have stopped, they actually affected very little in the short term for us. Still, OS updates, especially on Windows 10 has always been a bit of a ticking time bomb in terms of compatibility, so the acquisition is great news.
Anderton
Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
I'm sure Meng will chime in but you can rest assured that SONAR is not going to be dumbed down. The addition of SONAR completes BandLab's ecosystem by adding professional desktop production to their mobile platform.
That's the way I see it too, particularly with SONAR being able to offer "the next step" for users who were raised on mobile. BandLab didn't have a next step before, but they do now 
I think what a lot of the "oldsters" may be forgetting is that they all started somewhere. Music has always been a discipline that not everyone is willing to learn - there are a lot of starter guitars and keyboards sitting in closets. But if those coming up can have a gratifying musical experience easily, it gives them the incentive to take it further.
I've known quite a few DJs who after DJing for a while started learning an instrument because they wanted to continue to evolve. It wouldn't surprise me if for some people, the mobile BandLab approach becomes the "gateway drug" to an eventual lifelong interest in pursuing music.
There's another whole facet of dichotomy to consider here.
In many of the sessions/panels I do about writing music for media, I always make it a point to note the difference between writing for an audience, and writing for a client. They're incredibly distinct into their requirements as well as efforts furthering one vs the other.
There are musicians who cater only to an audience, and that's all they do - everything from artists and old-school albums, to DJs and club gigs, to a YouTube personality - to a certain extent your $$$ is dependent on how your audience clicks with you.
Conversely, there are musicians who cater only to clients, and that's all they do - there are hundreds of apps released every day, all the way up to dozens of blockbuster video games, movies, TV series, advertisement, etc with a steady flow of music-related jobs. People can and do make a living out of catering solely to clients and they aren't really ever known to an audience, and that's perfectly fine.
Now, as I said, it's not that there is zero overlap between the two domains. Obviously, if you write for a big movie or video game and people look you up, you naturally build an audience. The converse is also true, having a fanbase increases your chances of landing gigs. There's also these really niche yet lucrative hybrid outfits like that of botique trailer music - companies who specialize in industry albums meant for trailer placements, and yet they build an audience and actively sell music to them.
Regardless, again as I said, the requirements for both are very different. The YouTube star doing video game covers gets to pick and choose what they want to do to for maximum audience interaction and really push their strengths. The media composer doesn't have that luxury to pick and choose, and needs versatility and flexibility to do e.g. everything a game soundtrack needs. The media composer doesn't need to always worry about a nonstop march of fan interaction and engagement, while the YouTube star does. Both need reliability and accountability in significantly different ways (and if it does eat into creative time/energy, someone else needs to step in to take over these tasks)
Now, where I'm going with all this, is that one type of musician thrives a lot more on engagement, collaboration and ease of getting ideas across to other musicians, interacting with fans, letting people know what's up, etc. while the other type of musician typically are bound by client Non-Disclosure Agreements and are working on projects start to finish basically as part of a contract to ship a product, and doesn't really need to care about any of the above and instead requires a much deeper set of tools, offline reliability, security, etc. which necessitates what professional DAWs have been providing for decades.
I'm pretty sure the guys at BandLab are completely aware of this difference, and aren't acquiring Cakewalk simply to turn it into a similar product as what they ALREADY have. At the same time, there's a lot of shared group and sharing knowledge and feature sets between these two domains that will make for two stronger, richer products targeted at fundamentally different types of musicians.