[dterry]

Interesting thread. I am coming from the other direction - I've used other DAWs for years, including a year or two with PT a few years back, and am back with the PT11HD demo, considering upgrading my PT10HD license to 12HD.

Yes, other DAWs definitely have more advanced features in some areas - mainly midi (for my work at least).

But, the interesting thing I've found in doing direct comparisons between PT and 2 other major DAWs, is that the feature tradeoffs aren't always equivalent in terms of productivity in a day to day business.

For film scoring (my work), there is a balance between features of the DAW, and it's efficiency running heavy loads while using those features - sometimes you end up losing part of the advantages in order to carry the load modern film scoring requires. My template runs significantly more efficiently in PT (possible that PT is more efficient at complex bus routing and handling VEPro connections).

That wasn't the case a few years ago with PT8/9. DP has far more advanced midi and film scoring abilities, but PT has an overall faster workflow, and obviously, in this case at least, runs more efficiently. So I have to look at what do I lose or gain with each on a project. Running a large template cue without dropouts can be more important than having a spline tool for editing CC data (when I can record CC data on the fly anyway), or chunks for alternate versions. DP is fantastic, but it isn't very cpu efficient (at least in this case).

If you rely on specific features for most of your productivity, then that is going to dictate the best DAW for you. But, there are still a lot of things that Digi/Avid got right with PT long ago that no other DAW developer has duplicated - partly because they don't want to be seen as ripping of PT, and partly because some just don't get it. For pure audio editing and post, PT really is hard to compete with, regardless of the feature set others offer.

Just my .02.