Hi there Walker and Heks.
I did want to make a comment on this post but i was worried because all this talk about Orion might be upsetting the Synapse team as development has ended and we are still commenting on the loss of this great application ( And maybe deep down living in hope that something will happen in some form of a re - coded Orion ) The bottom line is that this is a forum where we should be able to have intelligent, constructive and friendly conversations, even if some criticisms and personal opinions are made it is usually never made with a flamethrower on this forum.
My personal opinion on an alternative DAW to Orion is that there is none, Orion is one of a kind and it was designed for a simple musician like me to fire up and directly apply the musical idea that is in my head to it with great ease, again in my opinion the Orion piano roll is the best, i must admit that i have not tried Mulab but i have tried Reaper, it takes more mouse clicks than Orion to just load a vst instrument and hear it when you press a key on your controller keyboard and also you cannot change the grid size in the piano roll ( 32,24 etc.)
To get around my problematic Vst's (The Vst's are not faulty as they worked fine in Reaper) that cause Orion to crash and make the machine gun noise is to stream to WAV the performance of those plugins, use the WAV in an audio track then remove the plugin from the song, i must say that so far this is working nicely and my CPU load has gone down a lot for my tunes, this is the way that i have found to keep using Orion with modern Vst instruments as my brain is wired in a way that i can only connect with Orion and to me there is no alternative unless another DAW appears on the market with a very similar layout.