I have sat down with Reaper on four separate occasions, once for every major revision. The first time I was disappointed by the lack of features. The second time I was impressed with how far they'd come. The third time I started to consider it as a viable alternative to SONAR but found many routine actions to be overly obtuse and awkward.
The fourth time was this past month, when I took Reaper with me on holiday along with how-to documents and videos. I spent three weeks in the shade of a mango tree getting cozy with Reaper, determined to grasp the mindset of its developers. And I had an epiphany: I realized that the program's greatest strength and greatest weakness is that it was created by programmers serving as their own market research team. Consequently, they designed a program that's ultra-flexible and makes perfect sense -
if you're accustomed to thinking about the world in terms of programming objects.
Now, I've long despised marketing people and thought of them as leeches earning a paycheck on the backs of the real talent, the coders. But the truth is that programmers, left to their own devices, will create user interfaces that make sense to them but not necessarily to anybody else. It's the non-techs who have to maintain some kind of linkage to the real world.
It wasn't until I put on my bit-flipper hat and approached Reaper like a coder that it suddenly made perfect sense. At that moment I also realized why Reaper isn't for everybody.