Your probably right Glen. Now how will the future of music look like in your minds eye?
I will listen very carefully for it will possibly result in a Gazillion dollar enterprise.
I have no idea what "the future of music" will hold in any kind of general terms, but with regard to specifically what we were talking about, here's what I see as the next "logical" (so to speak) step in DAW software development. Again, I don't advocate it, I just predict it.
The auto-mixing DAW: The user supplies the tracks to the DAw software and IDs the tracks with ID tags (e.g. snare, rhythm guitar, didgeridoo, etc.) just like now. The DAW software is programmed to recognize particular track ID tags for th instruments that they are so that it can look up the various mixing instructions in it's mixing library.
Then it assigns a pre-set or user-selectable panning scheme to them based upon the ID'd instruments. For example, the user might select a "Hard rock LCR" or "Live jazz ensemble stage" panning scheme and let the software run it automatically.
Then, using Hair-Ball style technology it analyzes the frequency envelope of each track and then applies EQ accordingly to minimize instrument masking and maximize frequency band assignment for each instrument, based upon panning scheme, instrument type and user-selected genre preset.
And finally, it looks at the results so far and adjusts peak and RMS levels for each instrument track based upon a preset library of relative track levels, again user-selected based upon genre, preferred panning scheme, etc., automatically peak and RMS normalizing the mix to avoid clipping and provide nominal pre-mastering loudness.
And of course, this will sell and be stolen like hotcakes because this is all most folks *think* that mixing actually is. And then one of two thing will happen. Either all home recordings will even more to sound like the same canned crap because there's virtually no actual mixing going on and no artistry being applied to what little mixing is there, or the wave of newbs wanting to know why their mixes don't sound "pro" will just become even more firmly ensconced in the culture of places like this.
G.