merlyn wrote: ↑Fri May 14, 2021 2:42 pm...but it's not what I'm used to.
This is a tall hurdle for people to overcome. I doubt you can appreciate Reaper until you've gotten accustomed to the way it works. Which by the way, was very easy for me after having used: Cakewalk, Cubase, Nuendo, Logic for PC, n-Track Studio, Sonar. Reaper has some things which seem unusual, as all DAWs do. The basics though, for "just recording", are ready to go. After choosing my audio device, I double-clicked in the track control panel area to add a track (I guessed at that, and I was right), I armed the track and hit record. It was the "most hardware-like" initial experience I've ever had with a DAW. Like some others here, I started with hardware recording devices (tape) in the 80s and moved on from there.
As for Reaper's master track: it's the final bus things funnel through before rendering, which when working with a stereo mix is commonly referred to as "the 2-bus" on hardware mixers, so that's also quite representative of a hardware workflow. If you don't like working with it, you can use any other track as a bus.
Of course, Reaper doesn't strictly follow a hardware-based paradigm. Any Reaper track can have up to 64 audio channels and rout to/from any other track. (The exception to this is the master track, which can't rout to other tracks. It only routs to hardware outputs.) Someone made a tutorial about how to do an entire mix with Reaper using a single track, for instance. There are so many things about Reaper which allow it to be flexible that I have trouble limiting it to a few examples. To use that functionality usually requires some sort of dialog, or at least triggering an action, but that's to be expected of any program. If you want to limit the number of dialogs from your specific workflow, chances are there's an easy way of doing it whether you add toolbar buttons, make custom actions, use third-party scripts, assign things to a MIDI controller, or all of those. Again though, for the basics, it's ready to go with very little to slow you down.
The only thing I notice about Ardour that's missing in Reaper is about how the effects chain works specifically. Ardour has some things in this regard that some Reaper users have asked for. But on the other side of that coin: there are many things about Reaper that Ardour isn't set up to do, or capable of doing (at least yet).
Keep in mind that good MIDI functionality is important even for people who don't make "electronic music". I use a drum instrument for realistic sounding acoustic drums, and that is programmed with MIDI. Because of this, I want some more advanced MIDI functionality to make that easier for me. Having used MIDI sequencers alongside tape-based recording devices (and having a "sync stripe" track to keep MIDI in time), just for the sake of using a drum machine (let alone any synths), once you leave that paradigm behind you can really appreciate MIDI functionality which helps your workflow, even if "just for drums".
There are more workflows for different reasons, too: scoring video, foley work, video game music, voiceovers/podcasts, live performance, and more. Reaper can handle all of them, sometimes amazingly well. Someone recently made an "automixer" Reaper plugin (for free) that balances volume levels across multiple audio tracks (with or without priority on a particular track), and can switch video sources automatically at the same time. Imagine using that for podcasts or interviews (and yes Reaper can handle playback of video tracks, several of them simultaneously, and has video editing/effects functionality).
This doesn't mean Ardour is inferior. It's about the workflow a person wants/needs. But Reaper isn't more difficult to start with compared to other DAWs, unless you've gotten accustomed to the way another DAW works. Reaper can be used for "just recording audio" very simply, or it can be used for many other workflows (some of which are necessarily more complex).