[unepipe]

Sounds like you had a bad experience, but as others have said, the Ableton has changed substantially in the past 5 years. Ableton 9 came out in March of 2013, at which point the time limit issue would be resolved.

Regarding the interface being unintuitive, I think that could be true for those who are experienced in standard linear DAW workflows, and I could see how it could feel unintuitive for someone looking to record a Serato DJ session. It's got a lot of tools for music production, and you'd need to be in Arrangement view, not session view.

As a software developer and someone who likes to mess around in music production, the interface became incredibly intuitive once I did the (included) software tour and learned the difference between Arrangement View and Session View, and what could be accomplished in those.

In terms of music production (not DJing), the way instruments and effects are set up reminds me of objects, where you have data and methods. You create sound clips on instruments which are kind of like functions you can reuse. (Just a loose analogy)

If you build a bunch of clips on instruments in the Session view of these you can use them together to create a song that you improvise somewhat, within the sounds and drumbeats that you have pre-created. It's really fun if you play with it and get accustomed to how the software works!