I'm in two minds about Sonar and my future with it. On the one hand, trialing other DAWs makes you realize how many ways Sonar had it right. And it's little things, like when I play with S1 and see no peak level readout on the meters. Then there's Sonar's ease of routing, exporting, recording synths to audio etc. It has an excellent workflow and things like workspace arrangement, zooming in and out of tracks, auto-zoom, smart grid and the smart tool become almost like an extension of your brain once you're familiar with them.
On the other hand, there was a lot wrong with Sonar. And much of it was weird, almost unquantifiable stuff that's impossible to reproduce for a bug report. Things like projects developing weirdness as they got bigger and older (I even had to abandon and recreate a few projects that developed oddities). As an example, I'm working on a project now in which the Aim-Assist line is a few measures out whenever I drag a clip. I've had clips suddenly jump to another part of the screen (including other tracks) when I dropped them. I've had loads of bizarre stuff happen with automation lanes, like recording multiple parameters on a synth only to find that some of the parameters I moved didn't end up being recorded. I've had lanes disappear never to be seen again. I've had all sorts of trouble associated with those damn "orphaned envelopes," and phantom, elusive nodes that I couldn't find anywhere nonetheless artificially extending the length of my track so that "fit to screen" didn't work as expected. There is so much other annoying stuff, like the browser not supporting back/forward navigation buttons on mice, and plugin/send menus that didn't fit on screen properly. Recently I've had Sonar resetting a bunch of Waves EQ's each time I load the project, and this is a horrible, deal breaking problem that I've suffered on and off since first using Sonar in 2012.
In short, the problem with Sonar has always been that it's an old program which has picked up a bunch of oddities along the way, and has probably suffered a little under the strain of all that new stuff being piled on top of it. I'm willing to bet that there were times that Noel and his crew felt hindered by a lot of legacy stuff in the program, stuff that would probably have been written a lot differently had Sonar been designed from scratch today. The oddities that I experienced on a daily basis absolutely messed with my workflow and productivity, and as a beta tester I spent many fruitless hours trying to come up with recipes for weird, phantom bugs that would be there one minute, gone the next. I almost felt like I was not performing as a tester because of the number of weird issues I couldn't isolate, and because so many of these issues are there one minute and resolve themselves the next, it was hard not to feel like user error might be the culprit even when you were almost certain it wasn't.
So ultimately, I'm excited about leaving those oddities and quirks behind and starting afresh with a younger program that's had its foundations modeled on today's technology rather than technology from 30 years ago. I feel no "loyalty" toward Sonar, after all it's not a conscious being and has no feelings. I'm going to keep using it for as long as I'm still working on the many projects I have in development, but I think the next new project I start will be in my shiny new DAW (whatever that may be).