I realize there is 5 pages of valuable info, so who the hell am I kidding thinking I mighy have valid input.
But hey, never stopped me before from opening up my yap.
The best daw for a beginner?? I'd say the cheapest one. (that's a real daw. Garageband and Audacity doesn't qualify)
See the thing is, ALL daws are hard to learn when coming from nowhere. All have an incredibly steep learning curve.
There is no such thing as a 'baby steps' daw. There are some starter introductory daws, but they just generally don't have all the features.
All daws sound the same. There's no such thing as this daw sounds like crap.
You only run into that with analog gear where one piece sounds better than another.
But all daws sound the same on their own.
So we're back to the cheapest one.
Reaper is highly popular because;
A) It's cheap. Costs 60 bucks to buy and you have an unlimited trial period.
B) It's full featured. It's not a toy daw like garageband or trial versions of other products
C) It has a crapload of really good plugins, and new ones are getting developed all the time, and it takes most all third party plugins.
D)There are soooo many educational resources to help you learn it
Reaper has it's own forum, there's a youtube channel called ReaperTV, there is a 400 some page manual.
So you're set.
It does what any other pro daw does, it's cheap and you have educational support.
What's not to like?