After our rather hefty comments here, I see more clearly the ways in which we seem not to align, so I guess we’d probably are reaching a point of agreeing to disagree, if you also agree.
When you give imposing and (to users here) pretentious qualifiers to comparatively demerit SL for more than “photoshoping sound” with RX, then your experience with SL is obviously poorer than ours. And that includes extracting sound which also employs AI, but at special cases with SL it involves applying several steps creatively, adapted to varying situations as opposed to simply open the module and feather your options thru RX presets… which is the only angle I could see I could get (in your wording) “universally better results from RX” mostly automated actions, which is, simply not my usage case.
We’d probably converge in this within time and usage, but that hasn’t happened yet.
Then the rigorous search for bug and usage improvements you’d been informing at the forum, that I praise and welcome, has come to happen quite a long time from version release. Actually after the tidying process had been had and many different usages had been tested. I know for a fact that in decades mature software, new glitches and improvs may be found by inquisitive users. Do such findings make a singled fix “a baseline” for its usage? Nope, to say it succinctly. Again, maybe for you it does.
Are your mentioned “usability expectations that accompany a modern software in this price range in 2021” the same in technical and many times specialized user base, to the expectations that would be had by global, larger segments? Not always, and as you point, if growth is a consideration, then yes, such is a variable to factor in. We’d surely disagree in its application degree.
Also I do not share your disregard for SL’s UI, which renders a UX very akin and high compatibility to my multi-screen system. Obviously you prefer to work with separate modules, which I sense will complicate the work with layers, tracks and several editors simultaneously. Your UX choice is yours entitlement. I comment only to offer an alternative to onlookers who might read disproportionately your universal disqualifiers, which expressed as such demerits the actual demands and requests already put forward here last year by the forum users and the responsiveness that acted upon most all.
Despite the relative quietness of the forum in the recent months, I sense we are a thriving community increasingly getting vocal and building a healthy relationship with the main developer, a research investigator with several papers on one of the leading fields that constitute the frontier of what these visual softwares may achieve.
In RX Advanced words: You can fix only what you can see, and Robin’s research is precisely on the field of what and how to extract information from images by visual software, there have been other researchers on related fields involved (if interested, I posted some info about his research and links earlier at this forum, it is available at internet). This is an strategic area companies won’t publish, but that I ponder in view of the incentives of who develops the tools one invests in.
So to no overextend what I believe has been already expressed here or elsewhere, a reiteration for you to get to know the tails, roots and complexities of this tool, of its evolution and of the community that as such and overtly is beginning to show the possibilities envisioned along the way and novel ones.
BEst