Aw, what?! I was being delightfully witty and insightful, playful yet with devastating logic!
<<THERE IS NO CENSORSHIP ON THIS FORUM>>
(Very funny WT.)
Myself, I got into PC recording years ago coming from stand alone digital multitrack machines, and before that tape based ones. So I was really starting from nothing, I didn't really have any experience with other DAW software.
I built a PC, bought an interface, and installed Sonar LE and Cubase LE which both came with the interface. I liked the look of Sonar better than Cubase, so I started there, and it instantly froze and made awful horrible screeching noises and I had to kill the process. I uninstalled and reinstalled and did the same with my interface drivers and finally e-mailed Sonar tech support for help.
I got a response with lengthy instructions and a file for a special setup in the interface mixing software(E-mu's Patchmix) to get it to work with Sonar LE, and I had to use that setup to make it work.
I thought, "Is this for real? I thought the whole thing about recording on the PC was its amazing flexibility and usefulness with a wide variety of plugs and software from different sources. This freaking DAW CAME with my interface and it's so crippled I can't even use the mixing software unless it's basically hardwired one way?"
I could have used Cubase LE or Ableton Live Lite, which were also included, but before I did that I just started researching online to see what was available and what sort of coin I'd have to part with. In the course of this, I kept seeing the name REAPER pop up in discussions and arguments where people talked about being fed up with the bugs and workarounds in their expensive DAW software and how they had switched over, and that mess sounded like exactly what I wanted to avoid.
So down the rabbit hole I went. And from day one, Reaper worked perfectly with all my hardware and has been fast, efficient, stable, and just all around freaking awesome. This was back in the 2.0 days, and I've never looked back.
So I guess I technically didn't really 'switch' to Reaper. More like I shopped around and chose it from the start. But, although at times unintuitive and demanding, Reaper provides such incredible flexibility and depth of customization that I've become very accustomed to being able to do just about anything I want with it in terms of GUI, track, channel, and effects routing, side-chaining, and editing. Reading the experiences of other users on various forums, I think I would find the forced workflow of some other software infuriating, especially when things become laborious and complicated in order to work around a bug or problem that should have simply been fixed already.
All that being said, compared to what I used to work with back in the day ALL the software available to us now is exceptionally capable and if anything we all suffer from an embarrassment of riches. But Reaper is still the king for me because of it's flexibility and stability, and exceptional community and developer response.