Thanks for Ardour. I've been using it on an off for a couple of years now (every time I get the itch to remix some pop song that's stuck in my head).
I will say that I consider Ardour unintuitive, and reading your post on the forums I think we have different takes on the perspective used for this criteria. You seem to be making the argument for users coming from other DAWs to Ardour, whereas Ardour was for me was the first DAW I used. Thus rather than comparing it to existing tools I always try to find out how to do X, and often I have to Google for help because what I expect to be possible is not straightforward/"intuitive".
Let me give out two examples that tripped me up recently
1) Wasn't able to easily reorder my tracks. I would have found intuitive to be able to drag & drop tracks within the main view. Instead I had to switch to the mixer view to reorder them.
2) I was playing around with a song that had around 20 stem tracks. Grouped them out by voice, melody, percussion. But once grouped I couldn't find an easy way to solo an individual track within a group, as the solo button would solo the entire group. For me a group specific set of controls would be intuitive, whereas existing buttons changing their behaviour is not. If I recall correctly I had to click the group name in the main view for it to become uncolored (disabled?) for individual controls to effect individual tracks.
Re: 1: View > Show Editor Lists and then you can drag & drop in precisely the same way as in the Mixer window.
Re: 2: the primary modifier key (Ctrl on Linux/Window, Cmd on macOS) overrides group operations universally. So click on a solo button for one member of a group, solo the whole group; Primary-click ... solo just that member.
1) That's definitely useful info, I was not actively aware of the Editor List. If it shows up on the first Ardour startup I probably closed it out just to have more room available in the default setup.
2) Also wasn't aware of the "primary modifier key". What I noticed from giving it a quick try on my project is that when holding down Ctrl cannot solo a single track in the Show Editor Lists -> Tracks & Busses window (clicks are prevented). Nor does it allow me to adjust individual volume sliders per track within a group. But seems to work for all the other track controls.
Re 2: the editor list "Tracks&Busses" tab uses a GTK TreeView for displaying status and offering controls.
GTK's treeviews don't make it very easy (understatement!) to make cells in the treeview detect keyboard modifiers. When you click on the green/gray box in the solo column, mostly what we know is that you clicked, we don't tend to get modifier info. I was referring to tbe buttons in track headers/mixer strip, but you're right it should be consistent/universal. I'll see what I can do.
Regarding faders not being group-overridden by the Primary modifier ... yes, that's true. Ctrl-drag on the fader provides finer-grain control. However, there's a reason for this difference. In general, we recommend that people use VCA's for group gain control and disable shared gain control in a group. It gives you a much more flexible working style, and is a feature typically found only on extremely expensive mixing consoles. Ardour offers both SSL and Harrison style VCAs (i.e. heirarchical/stacked or parallel), depending solely on how you set things up.
I will say that I consider Ardour unintuitive, and reading your post on the forums I think we have different takes on the perspective used for this criteria. You seem to be making the argument for users coming from other DAWs to Ardour, whereas Ardour was for me was the first DAW I used. Thus rather than comparing it to existing tools I always try to find out how to do X, and often I have to Google for help because what I expect to be possible is not straightforward/"intuitive".
Let me give out two examples that tripped me up recently
1) Wasn't able to easily reorder my tracks. I would have found intuitive to be able to drag & drop tracks within the main view. Instead I had to switch to the mixer view to reorder them.
2) I was playing around with a song that had around 20 stem tracks. Grouped them out by voice, melody, percussion. But once grouped I couldn't find an easy way to solo an individual track within a group, as the solo button would solo the entire group. For me a group specific set of controls would be intuitive, whereas existing buttons changing their behaviour is not. If I recall correctly I had to click the group name in the main view for it to become uncolored (disabled?) for individual controls to effect individual tracks.