I really don't buy this. Ableton was created by an excellent musician (Robert Henke), and its design reflects a musician's perspective. It's intuitive and flexible. It doesn't work for every possible workflow, but no individual piece of software could.
That's arguing from authority and ignoring the meat of my point.
I know Robert Henke created Ableton Live and it was a tremendous innovation when it came out.
Over time it gradually expanded features but never dealt with a variety of things that might be development intensive but would in no way break the workflow.
For example:
Support advanced midi stuff. Like, any of it. Why is it so mind bogglingly inconvenient for me to hook up my continuum or my linnstrument to Live?
Loops of arbitrary length/non warped loops, as I mentioned in another comment, are unnecessarily hard to implement.
Why can't I midi map to certain controls, why can't I macro map to certain controls.
Why can't I easily lock stuff in the arrangement view so I am not terrified to change the master tempo.
Why can't I group things in arrangement and edit them together.
why can't I intuitively stretch a sample in arrangement view, when the whole sell of ableton is time stretching?
It's not arguing by authority, it's arguing by counterexample. Robert Henke doesn't represent all musicians, but he is a musician, so it's not possible that Ableton doesn't reflect the perspective of any musician.
All the things you mention relate to a certain workflow. It's not my workflow, it's not every musician's workflow. It'd be great if Ableton had good SysEx support, but it's not accurate to say it has a "complete disregard for music" because it doesn't fit your workflow exactly. Ableton is designed to simplify working with repetitive beats. If you don't want any of those, of course it's going to be difficult to use.
