I don’t have deep experience with alternatives to inform comparisons, but I’ve enjoyed working with http://reaper.fm/ for the last few years for hobby projects swapping between linux, windows, and macos with a generic Behringer usb audio interface. The flexibility of track folders and arbitrary routing means that you can approach things from several different mental models and still translate an idea into sound. The bundled plugins and jsfx focus on foundations, so that they can naturally achieve equivalent sounds of many (most?) paid plugins with prettier but less-capable interfaces.

Kenny Gioa’s tutorials http://www.kennymania.com/reaper-videos/ are a deep catalog of examples demonstrating how to make interesting music. There are often many ways to translate concepts to audio, and reaper provides you the tools to make it happen with out imposing strong opinions on how you get there.