Good to know, I didn't mind Cubase's workflow per se, it's just that Cubase was 1) super buggy and unstable, and 2) ridiculously expensive, and updates cost a lot. That also factored into leaving.
I'll give Ardour a try, thanks for the response and congrats on the release!
FWIW, I would absolutely recommend learning a regular linear DAW in addition to FL Studio. I'm not an FL user, I'm a heavy Ableton Live user (entirely because of Max for Live), and it is also "non-standard". There are a lot of things that are much, much faster in DAWs from the pro-tools oriented lineage and it is well worth the few seconds it takes to copy audio from one to the other at times.
I'm aware, I've used Cubase long-term, as well as a number of other ones in the past. FL Studio still gives me the fastest iteration speed out of all of them so far.
However, I don't think that's due to FL Studio somehow being architected better or worse. I just think its score ("piano roll") editing controls are much better than most other DAWs I've used and it gets out of my way for the most part when trying to get things from brain to screen ASAP.
I'll give Ardour a try, thanks for the response and congrats on the release!