Abeltons UI is very clean and seems to be a good balance between power and readability. It seems that the trend is to clean things up though. Sonar X1 looks l

Abeltons UI is very clean and seems to be a good balance between power and readability. It seems that the trend is to clean things up though. Sonar X1 looks like a step in that direction, logic and Cubase seem to be trending that way as well. I have some experience with real hardware, so I can understand the desire to emulate the look of a real device if you are trying to sound like it. I have also always been hopeful about the "future" of music apps and that maybe we should start moving forward more than looking towards the past. Part of the problem is the fact that until recently much of the "vintage" gear was unattainable to the masses. Now that we can create 90-95% identical digital copies we seem to want to focus on recreating all the gear we couldn't afford. As for the new gear, we seem to have forgotten that we should create things that sound good, not something infinitely flexible. Most importantly, I think the biggest problem with audio software is that features are emphasized over robustness. I wish that all of the vendors would step back and just spend 3-5 cycles making their apps stable.