Hi LV!
Nice and interesting write up of your experiences and opinions there. I agree with most all of it except:
"Saving projects is still a huge problem. In addition to LADISH we do now have NSM, the Non-Session Manager, which seems like a workable solution, so we'll see how this works out in the long run.
LMMS seems to be the only game in town for those who want to save full projects by just clicking "Save" and not having to install and configure a "session manager". I must admit, by the way, that I have not followed LMMS recently."
Saving projects is only tricky if you use the modular approach versus instrument plugins hence this isn't really a problem for A3 and qtractor. Aside from LMMS, MusE and sunvox have a few integrated instruments so they don't have this problem either (if you stick to the built-in synths for Muse only - sunvox doesn't handle plugins) and pretty soon MusE should gain native VST support to further improve this situation.
Your article has reminded me of my one and only JACK complaint/ feature (yep - just one!!!) request which I filed a couple of years ago now but is still to be addressed:
I'm surprised others haven't been asking for more descriptive 'device busy' error messages from JACK as for many years this has been my only issue with JACK - it doesn't start and you don't know what process is preventing it doing so. Quite often I'll not bother doing the detective work and just reboot but that is hardly ideal so I think this small addition would make JACK (and qjackctl) and as a result Linux audio much more user friendly.