Firstly, I am sad for the Cakewalk Team that all their hard work over time is just being put down and that they will have to search for other, perhaps less fulfilling positions.
Secondly, a special thanks to Don Williams for his generous offer on Overture 5, which was already on a generous offer price. I decided to read this thread today and work my way from start to finish, otherwise I might have missed it. It has sweetened the bitter pill that the loss of Sonar is and has almost gifted something that gives a hint of what Sonar might have been if the management team at Gibson had any imagination beyond the balance sheet.
The rest has already been said by many people far more qualified than myself.
I notice that Marshall are now offering a limited edition refrigerator and can only assume that Gibson have leapt down the 'me too' marketing route and plan to offer a refrigerator themselves at some point as it is the only common sense reason for such a bizarre acquisition as Philips.
I do own Les Pauls. All are good, though a couple are great [one being a 2015 - Shoot me!]. The changes to fretboard woods are more connected with the CITES regulations for exporting anything containing Rosewood, but given the two common choices of Ebony [expensive] and baked maple/others [cheap], they chose the cheap option when other manufacturers have not. This is actually more telling of the current situation at Gibson than anything else to me.
I do own many other guitars as well and it is true that Gibson went through a serious quality control problem that I believe they were trying to turn around with the 2015 series but some of the fairly radical modifications upset many purists, so rather than increase sales they dropped. Such is life. Admittedly the G-Force autotuners are great when they are calibrated [very important] after every string change and work & not so great when they do not, but you can still tune manually, even with the G-Force unit fitted.
It remains to be seen if the scrapping of Sonar turns out to be a tax dodge to help Gibson out with their financial problems, if so it will be even more of a shame that a once proud marque has been reduced to this sort of behaviour to fend off the sword of Damocles.
The fact that there are now a bunch of competing DAW programs on different platforms would normally be a good thing, as under normal market competition the strongest will drag up the weakest and those that do not compete will fall by the wayside. This being the result of a takeover and selloff is seeing a primary driving force in the DAW market being retired and this will slow innovation in the other packages as they won't need to compete with anything Sonar might have delivered in the future. That can't be good for anybody.
There are far less DAWs out there than there are guitar brands, that's for sure, and like guitars some will do some things better than others. Sonar was brilliant at being able to supply MOST of what you could want in one package.
It wasn't perfect, nothing is, but its loss will be sadly missed.
Good luck to the ex-employees and all best wishes for a brighter future.