I'd be interested to hear what you think of Ardour. These guys ship it with some of their devices, and while I'm not even sure what half the products on their site are for their wikipedia page does not make them sound like toys.
We've discussed this before. Harrison made supadope consoles back when people gave a shit about supadope consoles which means effectively that their business model died circa 1996. Harrison would love for you to give a shit about Mixbus but you don't, I don't, nobody does because we've all got plugins that we all use and they all work in Mac and probably Windows. If you make iToys you write your plugins as AudioUnits. If you want the punk pikers you write VSTs. If you want it to be used by people who can actually afford to pay you you're writing .aax and it's working in Pro Tools. And yes - there are plenty of people whose GarageBand stuff has ended up on iTunes and isn't that nice. That you can make successful art despite your shitty tools is a testament to your perseverance and I applaud you all. But those of us who do it a lot? We'd like it to not be a pain in the ass. Mute, solo, fader, automate, EQ, dynamics, insert, send, pre-fader, post-fader, sync, monitor, isolate. I'm sorry, those aren't buzzwords. A $29 Rolls mixer from Guitar Center has mute, solo and "faders." And sure: Les Paul mixed Abbey Road on a four-fader Planar made out of used humbuckers and Sir George Martin's earwax at Electric Ladyland back when it was a canvas tent in Nigeria but fuckin'A stop holding up a stone axe and insist that it's a fuckin' Sawzall because if I smash it against the tree enough it'll fall over.All the buzzwords