I have a Yamaha AW16G DAW. It was under $1000 and I love it. I use it almost exclusively now to record my acoustic accordion through it's 1/4" jack. There is almost no noise and it is a breeze to get something recorded and burned to a CD. I messed around with Sonar for a while and got tired of it.

I don't like the 10,000 options of a softsynth. To me it's like drawing a picture with 10,000 crayons. You'll sit there and keep adding and keep adding and keep adding color until you've got this big ugly cluttered mess. At least that's the type of person I am. I'll tweak it until it's dead.

With my DAW, I record, maybe add a couple of effects, maybe not, and then burn it to CD.