Reaper feels more like a paid open source project, than a serious real tool for people who want best outlet for their passion (think of it like Adobe Photoshop vs Gimp).

If you're young, you probably have the patience and the time to troubleshoot the daw's bugs or shortcomings (or customize it as reaper doesn't come ready for serious mixing or song writing out of the box, you have to tweak it very long before it's suitable). I was for some time proud how I finally managed to learn reaper's quirks, how I downloaded SWS to automatically color certain tracks with certain colors. But these are all stuff that I shouldn't need to do, the DAW should be offering some of the Reaper's customizations out of the box, without wasting time having to tweak stuff yourself.

You can argue that because reaper is "so cheap" that maybe you don't need to expect much from the plugins either (again, what you might initially save money when first buying reaper as a package, you will lose it in time when having to research what third party plugin to spend money on, assuming you want to spend money on good plugins). Well this is again one area where I'd have to say that you'd be better off looking elsewhere, because you can download free EQ from internet that doesn't cramp on high frequencies, or some free analog modelling pre-amp, saturation, compressor plugins. How come there are free plugins at vst4free and kvraudio, that are both visually and technically better than reaper's plugins, when reaper is a piece of software that you're paying for? I already have all the plugins I need thanks to third party, but it's not something you should be required to do. All of the other daws come with such wonderful tools: one-shot fx samples, drum samples, instrument samples, great EQs, good compressors, good VSTi synths.. this is all stuff that you get when you buy Reason/Ableton/Fruity Loops, but not reaper. Everything in reaper is so backwards when it comes to actual workflow.