I think that’s where it starts. I’ve been trying to put this into words lately, and the best I can come up with is that FL Studio is a like a modular synth with no modular interface. Like, it has a baller “Midi module” between the step sequencer and the piano roll that you can use to control any VST as a competent “module” (with full control over midi routing in and out of that module and full control of audio routing out) which goes into a mixer “module” that can do all sorts of crazy stuff (about the wildest I’ve done is used the volume of one sound to control the amount of another sound sent to a reverb, but that’s frankly amateur hour in the mixer). I mean, the formula controller by itself that comes up when you want to control X by Y is a pretty powerful VCA, and you have essentially an infinite number of those at your disposal. And all of this is before you even touch Patcher, which I’ve only had to break out 2 or 3 times over the past decade.
I think where my comparison breaks down is that unlike a modular synth, you can’t see all these connections, they’re just there for you to manipulate if you know and you want to. That’s either a really good thing or a really bad thing depending on how much you want/need to see to understand your options. But it’s all that stuff that I miss when I try another DAW.
Demoed Ableton more than once now, and I will admit it’s default sample handling is better than FL, but for MIDI and audio routing, FL wins hands down. When I want to duck everything by the Kick in FL, I have 3 ways to do that easily (automation clips, 3rd party duckers, or using Peak Controller and Balance). I can do any of those to a whole mix in about five minutes, and I can duck every single mixer channel as much or as little as I please. Ableton by contrast expects you to either mix everything into a single ducking bus and duck it all by the same amount, use a 3rd party ducker and either never leave a 4/4 kick pattern or do a separate midi sequence matching the kick for each individual instrument you want to duck, or use an M4L device made to solve the first two problems by the community. And it’s like that every time I go to do something. Sequencing an arp. Sending an instrument to multiple busses and then mixing those back together before they go out to the master. Hell, having a dedicated track sequence window (in the form of the playlist) so that I can always look at my whole song and see the structure to get an idea of what I have and what I still need. Can’t wrap my head around Ableton’s loop structure by comparison.