for the OP, no offense but it seems like you've already made up your mind and looking for reasons to validate your decision, not all hosts are for every user and that's fine. I own Sonar 5, AA2.0, FL8 and I use to sell them all in the early days of DAWS. (turn of the century) I am not going into the dongle debate because it is a no win argument and I have debated it until I'm blue in the face. The best I can suggest to you is go with your gut, if your instincts are telling you not to go with Samp then don't. But...don't write it off either.
I demoed 8 before buying a new computer because I could have the company building my machine install samp. I didn't care for it, it seemed to confuse me and I wasn't sure what benefits I would get. At KvR some debates came up about Samp and by then it was version 9 (about 5 months after my demo of 8). and I found myself back on the Samp page because I wanted to know what the beef was. I discovered some new features I liked and I saw that acrossgrade was available. I wrote someone about it (or did I call? ) and they told me if I could wait a few days I'd get a better deal. I waited, got a great deal and haven't looked back. I took to samp right away, the only things that confused me turned out to be because the implementation was so much easier. For instance in AA you have the multi-track view and wav view, I hunted for how I just got a wav view in samp without having this long wav with all my takes.
The answer was you don't need the two views in samp. Everything else at the beginning were set up logically like I would like them. Example, I like voxformer and the way it handles things in the filter window. I like that you can change the bandwidth with the center wheel on the mouse, samps eqs are the same way. Of course there are many more examples but I'm tired lol.
However one thing that irked me with the demo was when I removed it, it also deleted some Sonar files and I had to reinstall Sonar. The bottom line is you do not have like Samplitude, it's okay...I don't like Cubase but a lot of my friends do.
btw remember, do not shop for features...look for benefits.