Huh, I could not disagree more. DAWs are some of the most well thought out, reliable software I use. For a relatively niche product it’s amazing to me that there are something like 10 very different but very high quality options to choose from.
And they have changed a lot in 15 years. Not that long ago you pretty much had to use hardware synths and samplers to create electronic music and DAWs were just used for recording or mixing tracks. Today you can create full tracks with just the included synths and samples, then you can play a live show straight from the same session, and there are tons of built in effects to get a great sounding mix. Plus details in the UI, routing tracks, editing audio and midi, beat detection of samples, etc are always improving with each release. I will grant you, a lot of the top companies (pro tools, logic, Cubase, ableton) were around in a similar form 15 years ago and some 25+ years ago, but that’s not totally crazy given how complex the software is.
As for something new coming along to mix it up, I’m curious what type of changes would meet that criteria? I’d say Ableton and more recently Bitwig (and I’m sure the argument could be made for many others that I’m less familiar with) have both done that.