I'm a bit curious... without wanting to derail the thread (then again, it's my thread, so that's my luxury ), but, I see a lot of complaining about take lanes. I don't use them, only the automation lanes (a godsend to me), however I may have to record some vocals in the future, and therefore those take lanes would likely come into play. What kind of hurdles can I expect exactly?

I can't speak for everybody else, but I agree the Automation Lanes were welcome. For me, the issues with Take Lanes are:

1. They are easily confused in the Track View for an actual track, when there's quite a few of them. I can get lost in them because the indention used to separate them from Tracks is so minimal.
2. Editing is buggy (read: filled with "cursidents"). Dragging clips between Lanes causes many weird things to happen, some that just don't make any sense for a serious professional, whether they are bugs or features. Many times, when I drag clips from one Lane to another, it drops into the wrong lane, so it requires a separate step to try to drop the clip into the wrong lane to get it in the correct lane.
3. The View of the Track doesn't echo the view of a lane, and vice versa. For example, after editing, say Clip Gain on a lane, when you set the lane's view back to Clips, then collapse the Lanes under the Track, the track remains in Gain Automation View. Also, the button you use to expand Lanes is sometimes illuminated Blue, even though you've only got one Lane. Just expand and collapse the single Lane, and the button turns blue. Dunno why.
4. Buttons for Lanes are exactly the same look as Tracks, which I think was an awful aesthetic choice, because the Mute in Take doesn't work the same as the Mute in the Track, but the button looks the same. During Tracking, the Mutes become unwieldy, and I found a bug there, although I haven't had time to report it.
5. The Track has a lot of wasted space when Lanes are expanded, unlike Layers, where the Layers were all contained within the Track. Wasted space. Also, when the Take Lanes are collapsed, what picture you see in the Tracks isn't necessarily the Take Lane you're really wanting to hear.

Anyway, I know others have gripes, but those are my primary gripes with Lanes. I made some suggestions for CW in another post, which may be gone, like some older posts have disappeared. 
 
One major suggestion I made was to expand the Track's left-hand height along with all the Take Lanes, so the Lanes are all still essentially still contained in the Track's frame. Another was that, when you solo a Take Lane, then collapse the Take Lanes, the picture that shows up in the Track is the Take Lane you solo'd.
 
I had some other suggestions, more in line with background color, etc. to make navigation and view easier on the eyes. i honestly don't know if anyone read them.

Spencer
I'm a bit curious... without wanting to derail the thread (then again, it's my thread, so that's my luxury ), but, I see a lot of complaining about take lanes. I don't use them, only the automation lanes (a godsend to me), however I may have to record some vocals in the future, and therefore those take lanes would likely come into play. What kind of hurdles can I expect exactly?

Crazy graphical bugs. Moving takes sometimes causes the clip to move to random places. When you bounce the clips, you end up with loads of empty take lanes which you have to then manually tidy up.

I'd like to add to the above take lane issues:
 
At this point...no take lanes are used. Record a vocal line. Punch in your takes all on one track. Add V-Vocal where needed. Bounce VV to clip when done. Sometimes V-Vocal mutes the old part of the clip and places it behind the bounced VV clip...other times it puts the muted clip right in the line of fire. If you by chance DO need to mute something by pressing "K" you will still hear things playing that should not be. Once you open take lanes on the track, you see clips that are muted yet still play audio. You don't know where it's coming from because you initially did NOT use take lanes. When you press K, you assume anything muted is really muted. Once you open take lanes, you see there is a clip that claimes to be muted yet is still very much alive. Sometimes it's a VV clip that you want to keep, other times it really is a clip that you wanted muted. The whole system is just bad in my opinion. The way VV handles tracks and the way Take Lanes work in general need a do-over.
 
-Danny

To answer to the subject: in this case I won't most probably upgrade to X3 unless CW surprises me with rewritten and well tested take lanes and more robust audio engine.

I'm getting tired with X2a. I feel multi-track editing is less fun than before but also slower. For me, development of Sonar is going to a wrong direction but I understand if the current roadmap will get more new hobbyists to buy it. Grass is greener on the other side and currently the only thing to keep me using Sonar is lack of time to learn using another new DAW efficiently. I hope from my heart X2b or X3 give me new reasons to keep Sonar as my primary DAW.

dorism

swamptooth

dorism
Touch is a gimmick - how did this even make the list?

remember the people who said midi was a gimmick?

nope

http://youtu.be/Jq6_vy4Pcwk?t=5m47s

I, personally, would like to see the "Touch" component as an option / add on...
so that I could opt out if I wanted to, and not waste the resources on it.
I won't be using it anytime soon, as Touch Monitors are still out there in price...
I won't be getting a tablet PC, so still don't need it....

I need a stable, usable, viable DAW...

Touch is most definitely the way of the future, but, for now, let's keep focus on 
the important aspects and the current MAJORITY of the user base, and what they
NEED, not what's NEW, KEWL, and UP AND COMING.

I think it's an awesome feature, for those who want to invest in the equipment to do it,
and I think it's great that Cake want to implement it...
but it should be an OPTION, not a mandatory, installation..IJS

(and I wish they had dedicated THAT time to the features that the Pro's NEED for usability and
stability, not the new fangled GIZMO'S at this point...BOTH would have been even better)

Good lord, that does sound pretty bad with the take lanes... to think, one of the reasons I went with Sonar 4 back then, was I thought the layers system and the comping tools were so well thought out and intuitive. Guess that's one more reason why X2 absolutely can't be left in this state before moving on to the next version.

cclarry
I, personally, would like to see the "Touch" component as an option / add on...
so that I could opt out if I wanted to, and not waste the resources on it.
I won't be using it anytime soon, as Touch Monitors are still out there in price...
I won't be getting a tablet PC, so still don't need it....

I need a stable, usable, viable DAW...

Touch is most definitely the way of the future, but, for now, let's keep focus on 
the important aspects and the current MAJORITY of the user base, and what they
NEED, not what's NEW, KEWL, and UP AND COMING.

I think it's an awesome feature, for those who want to invest in the equipment to do it,
and I think it's great that Cake want to implement it...
but it should be an OPTION, not a mandatory, installation..IJS

(and I wish they had dedicated THAT time to the features that the Pro's NEED for usability and
stability, not the new fangled GIZMO'S at this point...BOTH would have been even better)

I fully agree with everything you say here Larry.
 
As DAW software develops over time, surely we should be offered more options, not fewer. Just look at the furore over the almost complete lack of colour customisation in both incarnations of the 'X' series. And of course, the on-going disappointment a lot of us are experiencing with Take Lanes; don't get me wrong, it's no problem to me that some prefer them, but why isn't there the option to switch over to Track Layers if you prefer - I mean, the code is already written for that option.
 
This direction first manifested itself a few years ago when SONAR Home Studio 7 was used as the proverbial guinea pig to test out reaction the newer style layout. Home Studio 4 and 6 were much loved 'little brother' versions of SONAR Studio/Producer, but users left in droves when HS7 arrived. Luckily for Cakewalk, most of those of us who jumped ship stayed in the Cakewalk family after being placated with generous upgrade enticements to move to SONAR 8. In this case, I hate being proved right, but I said at the time the Home Studio 7 'model' would eventually be rolled out with the flagship products.
 
Again, don't get me wrong, in the main I really like the layout of X1 and X2, it's just the customisation issues and the wasted space in the GUI (e.g. I don't use the Multidock, but there is no option to remove it) that I think could be improved a lot.
 
 

I think Take Lanes are ok. Not terrible, not brilliant.
 
Increasingly, I think that's the problem with the way Sonar is developed. It's very broad, but not many things get very deep. It's fairly good at everything. Which makes it a really useful flexible working environment. But very few features ever seem to get worked up to a truly killer level.