I’m exactly in the same boat and I have no sympathy for Apple (i.e. computers with soldered SSD disks and RAM).
In my opinion Steinberg has a lot of good ideas but for some reason is not able to execute them.
When Cubase doesn’t freeze or render things incorrectly (this is my last nightmare when I use abrupt tempo changes), and you figure out how to encode videos outside of it, it is a pleasure to use it.
I also recently bought a UR44C and while the concept is fantastic (embedded DSP and ipad connectivity), the drivers again don’t work well in my old PC and the sound gets distorted every 4min (unlike a 10 year old noisy card from Roland that was meant to replace). Plus the hardware integration with Cubase doesn’t show up when you open Cubase. So I will be returning it and replacing it for a less capable card.
The point here is I’d rather stay with a noisy old Roland card or a limited Logic DAW than running a clean interface that distorts the sound in an unpredictable way and powerful software that fails you when you most need it. I’m also in a music school, and I’m virtually the only one to use Cubase (Logic, Ableton and Studio One are the names that I hear). It is good that they teach Cubase in Berkeley, but I’m not really sure that many music students will make that choice unless Steinberg makes a serious effort to address its bad reputation (poor default instruments, half-baked features, bugs).