I had little clue about DAW's when I chose to buy Cakewalk (X1 Studio?). I think the Cakewalk brand name was familiar to me though. Anyway, I upgraded and added Cakewalk plugins along the way to Sonar Platinum. And I put down another several bucks for the SPLAT lifetime subscription when it was first offered. Needless to say, I was fairly disgusted when that all went out the window.

I moved to SO when PreSonus offered a decent cross-grade deal. SPLAT still works just fine, but I don't use it.

Bandlab users got one heck of a DAW at one heck of price, that's for dang sure.