First off, welcome to the forum. Your thoughts on the GUI are not alone, there have been many who come in and want a updated look, but remember there are as many opinions on the look as there are people, and the fact is whether it functions is more important. I have noticed over the last few years every make wants to have a somehow new looking hammer, but still it is to drive nails.

When working with a program like Sonar, you can drop and drag tracks, bot midi and audio to Sonar.

Realtracks transfer as well,m also there is a DAW program that comes with BiaB, called Real Band, and while it is not as feature deep as Sonar it is a nice program, and does some incredible things. As far as being repetitive, that is possible, but not as likely, as they tend to be rather simple, and more targeted towards background tracking, and not as much of a lead instrument, yet that is slowly changing. I have found some lead licks to be difficult to fit in, and others just nail it. So it takes work.

As far as genre goes, there is some tracks that will help you, but yes it is aimed at Pop, Rock, Country, and very heavily towards Jazz. There are some blues, metal, and heavier Rock tracks, but not as many. If you use it as a track bed there will be cool stuff to use, as you mix in your own tracks.

Lenovo Win 10 16 gig ram, Mac mini with 16 gig of ram, BiaB 2022, Realband, Harrison Mixbus 32c version 9.1324, Melodyne 5 editor, Presonus Audiobox 1818VSL, Presonus control app, Komplete 49 key controller.