The scriptability of reaper is insane BTW. No other DAW even comes close. It is unfortunately full of pitfalls and hacks but if you persist you can pretty much script ANYTHING that you can do manually within reaper.
Sunken cost fallacy and Cubase - I can relate to that! Somehow they are really good at upselling even those users who are not really convinced about their product.
Cubasis 3 (the iPad version of Cubase) came out a year and a half ago and is still so horribly broken as to be unusable for a lot of users. At release it couldn't even have been considered pre-alpha. That was the point I finally gave up on them never to return.
It is also easy to write MIDI and audio effects in JSFX (https://www.reaper.fm/sdk/js/js.php) and there are tons of extensions available that do almost anything you can think of.
