[AndrewUnmuted]

You raise an outstanding point here, in that DAWs do tend to simply automate away the pain-points of making music as conceived of by people before the advent of personal computers. However I would caution against applying this mentality to Paul's project, which if anything is doing the most of any DAW out there to fight against those very conditions.

One of the primary problems with DAWs as conceived initially was that they were closed, proprietary systems comprised of stupid-expensive hardware to even just open the dang application. This helped to facilitate the inescapable bubble in which the Mass Media finds itself today, playing right into their competition-killing hands. So of course, the world was stagnant for 20+ years, since the only people that had access to this software were "audio professionals," who had the creativity, ingenuity, and passion of a wet noodle. And they did predictably lame things with it all.

When only Kanye West and T-Pain had access to polyphonic note editing, it was pretty lame indeed. But access is, in itself, novel. The world has since changed considerably, and we have projects like Ardour in part to thank for this.