I see you missed the whole "Logic Pro costs $499" era and the earth shattering news when Apple lowered the price to $199. And far too many DAW creators refuse to learn that lesson, instead going "you can have a DAW for $199 but you only get three and a half tracks, only one can be a plugin, and your audio files must be in 17 bit RIFF wave with the bytes in reverse order. If you want something better, pay us more".
Logic used to cost far more than that. When Logic 6 came out it sold for $999 and was a great deal because they’d finally bundled all the plugins and synths in to one package. To buy the whole package before than was thousands.
I remember when they dropped the price to $200. It's what finally got me to move from Garageband/pirating stuff. It's also what keeps me away from playing with a lot of other DAW's.
honestly the only way to get most of the other ones is to go "okay if I get a MIDI controller with a free copy of the entry level version, then I can bump that up to the REAL entry level version for cheap, and then when they release the next version I can bump that up to the intermediate version during a sale, and then a year later I can probably get the REAL version as a black Friday upgrade."
