As the title says I use Wavelab everyday and have since 1995. I use it for mastering and for restoration work and lately for some forensics. It is a GREAT DAW and I love how intuitive the interface is. I hope WL 13 will continue the long list of GREAT versions. I have interns working here and after a few days they are using WL for a lot of projects and feel comfortable using it and that says a lot.
FWIW
@Thomas_W_Bethel I’ve seen you on this forum for many many years, friend. I agree, Wavelab is a great piece of software. I’ve been using it since v1 as well. I also use Cubase for music production (since pre-VST) but for complex audio imaging, restoration, audiobook production, radio & podcast production - Wavelab continues to be my daily go-to production software. I’ll admit I was intimidated and challenged by the changes in v12 as I was so comfortable in v9.5 for the longest time. However, having made the jump about 1 year ago, I haven’t looked back. So many tools, so intuitive and so STABLE. Cheers to the WL team, PG and all on this forum who contribute and support this amazing product.
I’m really wanting to like this new layout but I can’t. It has become so bloated, and common things buried into layers of submenus the program seems to hate it’s user (making/labelling an MP3? pour a cup, you’ll be here a while). I just want to do things like manually resize and arrange my windows the way I want to, MANUALLY without baking a cake (create file sub group blah blah blah), crop a snare drum from a loop without it creating a fade-in that I DID NOT ASK FOR etc etc. The file previewer is terrible, tiny “play” buttons yet TONS of wasted real estate on the pane.. can’t easily navigate to my libraries like a basic Windows Explorer menu.. I have a long list.. I’m currently looking for other options. It was a good run, Wavelab, I give up on you.
For me Wavelab is my audio editor and mastering software, Nuendo is my DAW 
I switched from Sound Forge to Wavelab but I’m still learning…it’s nothing for me to redraw waveforms to fix problems in Sound Forge but I haven’t tried it in Wavelab yet!
I agree that there is a lot “under the skin” in WL12 and that there are too many “hidden menus” that can create real time problems for the user.
Still it is and will continue to be the best “mastering and restoration” DAW available in my opinion.
Could I suggest that you watch some of the very well done tutorials done by Justin Perkins and then make your final decision.
The other “perk” is to have PG on the forum everyday and to be able to converse with the author of WL via this forum is invaluable and something that you will not find in any other DAW forum. FWIW
It’s so hard to go back and watch tutorials for a program you’ve used for 30 years (I do remember buying Cubase VST for $99 circa 1994-5, Wavelab was right after). It was so easy and effortless and intuitive before I don’t think I had to ever open the manual… sooo frustrating. Even things like dragging plugins into a different order does not perform NEARLY as smoothly as in the past, it’s hit-or-miss.. I can’t understand why.
Wavelab is for professional users, who like to overthink things a little…
It is obviously well suited for almost every task in audio mastering, but definetely not optimized in mouse/click handling with its gui.
That needs much improvement. Every mouseclick, every action, that is not absolutely necessary is one too many. And there are tons of too many, as it stands now.
But it is, nevertheless, a fine programm.
Would Wavelab Elements be more convenient for people who do not need the extra features of the Pro?
In my opinion, nothing could be simpler in Wavelab. What kind of MP3 file are you trying to create and what steps do you usually take to do so?
What are you referring to here? Do you mean you don’t like the way the various windows are automatically docked?
Once again, IMO nothing could be simpler in Wavelab. Are you referring to the Audio editor or the Montage? What function / technique are you actually using to do this?
Do you mean the File Browser? If so, how are you actually using this?
The OP must have been referring to resizing file windows as before, but PG wrote cascading is not coming back. I hope cascading is at least part of Audio Editor for a future version of WL.
This kind of observation is very easy to make and you are entitled to your opinion, but what mouse clicks are you actually referring to?
Really? I’ll wait for the OP to respond…