About 3 (step sequencer). I have never used FL Studio, only Cakewalk. Mega Baby does not have many features (apart from its ugly looking not transparent interface and complete luck of accessibility). Sower was an attempt into interesting direction, but if I understand correctly it is not in active development.
As with a "trigger" (Ableton/CW Matrix, workarounded by PlayTime), it is possible to make some extension for Step Sequences. But both require the concept of "external source with own rules". REAPER API target audio/midi Items and has no mature "something else". As the consequence even native Cockos implementation of "something else" (ARA) was not trivial, doing the same externally (I mean good, not as a workaround) is hard.
I can try to clarify. A Step sequencer, a trigger and ARA on input have a kind of "item sources" (can be audio/midi, but can also be extra related data, possibly offline generated like analysis in Melodyne). As the output they have almost FX like behavior, with important difference: they need a possibility to sync with the host processing but also a possibility of transport independent output. The last is like "preview" in REAPER.
In other words, a step sequencer works as an item source + FX, almost as ARA, while trigger is more like "item less" FX. All of them need "preview" in addition to host sync mode (not "self given", Melodyne as an item FX editing was implemented recently but still has some logical quirks). Tricking REAPER is possible, but that not always looks nice and sometimes has limits.
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