Can you give some specific examples? You wrote a lot, but it’s entirely abstract as if Steinberg are to just read your mind and know what it is you are doing in your day to day work. No offense, just offering some input, but I see a lot of people who say what you are saying and then reference Ableton, of which I find the GUI infuriating and clunky.
Sure there are some quirks to each program that have pros over the other, but overall, I would actually say Cubase has better workflow. or the sum of Cubases pros and their effect outweigh the competitions.
Cubase is rooted in organizing things more complicated than itself - like managing complicated MIDI/Synthesizer hardware setups and studios and in an enormous amount of different ways and thus, crams in a lot of things that other DAWS do not. People who are doing typical DAW workflows don’t seem to understand why things are the way they are a lot of the time in Cubase. Different worlds. Cubase is as a CAD program is to Dubai architecture. These other DAWs are more like lego blocks where they are aiding the user in building a track that sounds like the track they heard on the radio as quickly as possible.
As soon as Cubase is too much like other program, or it’s too much catering to a certain market, or workflow concept… it loses what it’s good at. which is everything… like, a CAD program can design sky scrapers, or car rims… seems some people want it to be good at only designing flashy car rims… or lego blocks. Or another way to put it, Cubase foundation is in a way all the boring utilities in a science laboratory that are essential to conduct whatever kind of experiment you want which is why it was genius for Reason to go VST, and I actually think Ableton will likely go the same way eventually - because these are not actually benchmark applications. If NASA needed a DAW and it was Ableton vs Cubase, they would pick Cubase.