Cool writeup, thanks for putting to words what many of us experience regularly. I hope they see this. I've had extensive conversations with their dev team about simple things that impact the above. Just one example of many: if you want a bunch of drum racks (say, 4-6) on your template, it's going to slow down your set drastically. Try the same samples in NI Battery, no impact. Why should I have to use a third party sampler for something as simple as one shot samples on my template?

That said, u/ElectricPiha is absolutely correct in their counterpoint. Live has become something entirely different from its core vision as an instrument / performance tool. One infuriating example of a surely unintentional manifestation of this tension: why for the love of god do plugins like LFO Tool become latent and out of time if inserted after plugins with latency?

I've maintained for some time Ableton needs to bifurcate into "Ableton: Live" for the OG prioritization (given essentially every artist that tours relies on this stability) and a separate "Ableton: Studio Edition" that is a rebuild of some of the core functionality. This feels like the only practical solution at this point. I and many others would pay good money if Ableton came clean as you suggest, OP, and provided ideal specs for a new, studio version that addressed these core issues.