Since Gibson bought Cakewalk, I noticed the quality lowering, so I decided to try REAPER. I used Cakewalk Pro Audio and SONAR since 1997. I'd definitely recommend it, especially since you can try it for as long as you want at 100% functionality before paying for the very cheap license. And then themes are pretty much just to make it look pretty, but for me that goes a long way in enjoying the DAW.the default theme never really made me want to dive in and figure it out, but a couple different user theme's I found made it a lot more attractive which in turn made it easier to work with. I've set up toolbars that I can toggle in & out of existence for things like assigning track colors, adding new project windows/tabs, rendering, etc etc etc. As far as configurations, this is more in the keyboard shortcuts, toolbars, mixer window, floating windows & toolbars etc etc etc. I can't remember if SWS also reconfigured the Menu's or if that was another thing I picked up from someone else, but I have Reaper set up where all the Menu's are re-organized into categories that make sense, where the default menu's are sort of all over the place. They add all sorts of functionality through context menu's by basically making things more accessible and easier to figure out. What I mean by all that.look up 'SWS Extensions' for Reaper, they're a great example of (what I think is) one of the most widely used extensions/add-ons for Reaper. I think the biggest hurdle's for Reaper are figuring out what add-on's you need, how to configure things to make sense for your work flow, and finding a good theme that makes your experience a pleasant one.

That said, I don't have extensive experience with any other DAW, so my experience is probably different than yours would be.

Cakewalk by bandlab vs reaper