As we now seem to move towards "pro" applications........
Let me point out the key reason for my defense of Pro Tools.
Strip a system down to its absolute basic essentials - a recorder and editor. By doing that you eliminate anything considered "bad" in Pro Tools (and once again, the same "bad" points also effect other DAW's).
As an editor and recorder, PT is the most cost effective, the most time effective, the most efficient, and the most stable system out there. If it was not, no commercial studio would use it - quite simple.
I will not defend Digidesign hardware, especially the old stuff, which I considered bad sounding crap. However, the new I/O's are very decent (even tough I only use the digital I/O and none of the Digidesign converters, clocks etc.). Items like for instance
the Control 24, which is a superb and extremely cost effective controller, the 002, which is a damn cute little box, the HD MIDI box, which is the most stable midi box I've ever used, are definately steps in the right direction.
In my deranged mind, the core of a modern recording system is the recorder and the editor. Pro Tools does that without fault. Everything else works as well, but can be improved upon.
In this studio we use Pro Tools just like that, as a recorder and editor. We do not use Digidesign's clocks, A/D converters, D/A converters, or summing busses, but have made investments in the best converters money can buy at present. The same goes for the front end, where mics, solid state pre's, tube pre's and compressors are the equivalent or in some case better than those found in the top studios.
The end result is a commercially viable studio capable of competing with the best-of-the-best, at lower overheads, as we did not have to fund the 5 to 8 hundred thousand dollars required to do the same thing with a major console and a couple of 2" machines. (and would have still needed a DAW for editing etc.). The funniest thing of all - the sound quality we now obtain is just about the best I've ever managed to get out of ANY system.
Bringing it down to the "home" level. Its a simple fact that Digidesign offers extremely cost effective "start-up" solutions that sound damn good for the money. A lot of my clients use them to do their songwriting and arrangement work at home, then come here to track live instruments, vocals etc. To transfer one of their tracks to our system takes minutes and we're up-and-running, when we're done we transfer the results back to their SCSI or firewire drives and they can play around with the results at home. Perfect, cost effective solution, and technical errors made in recording taken out of the equation, tracks recorded on 001's, 002's, and even Mboxes have been perfectly useable.
Are there other DAW based recording systems out there that offer all the same benefits? Perhaps yes, if you keep the track counts and plug-in processing at a minimum. But for "heavier" applications? Absolutely not. There was one that sounded good and looked very promising, SAW, but that suffered from genius eccentric development, so often seen in the analogue world as well. Had a company like for instance Steinberg bought SAW we might have seen some viable competition to Pro Tools.
