Your expected experience is shaped by the software experiences you've already had. This is why the first users of touch surfaces were so blown away by it - an experience completely unpredicted and unanticipated by previous experience.

Likewise, your needs are defined in part by the capabilities we currently understand software to have. Before anyone understood how to do timestretch in a way that preserved pitch, nobody saw that as a "need" in an audio application. Now it is a very common feature, and among a very sizable fraction of the people who use DAWs, it is a "need". Once upon a time, text editors had no undo feature. Once upon a time, editing video on a computer was impossible. Once upon another time, realtime audio synthesis was impossible. The Len of those times, I am certain, would have defined his needs differently than the Len of today.