Logic Pro X

Logic has long had a home in the 'pro' world at the songwriting and demo production stage. You'll be hard-pressed to find an engineer in a commercial studio doing tracking or mixing in anything other than Pro Tools (though they certainly exist), but Logic has a healthy following with artists themselves. When viewed through that lens, the changes made in this version are a pretty natural progression for the software: for the most part, they're aimed at the writing and tracking process.

With that in mind, the 'Drummer' feature is less 'Garageband-y' than it might look: it's a considerably more flexible alternative to the giant pool of pre-recorded beats (Apple Loops) that Logic has had for a long time. Such a tool is pretty useful to the songwriter putting a demo together, to the music-for-picture composer, to the ever-growing army of artists who ship off near-completed songs to musician-for-hire studios on the web. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's heard those loops in commercial recordings (often in TV music, which is composed under deadlines to tighter budgets). I'm looking forward to being able to have my temporary backing rhythm follow the sections of a song: far better than trying to find a matching loop or building a beat from scratch when all you want is to lay down a guitar part and focus on developing your idea.

Your argument about the bypass button is just silly. If you have a bunch of plugins open on screen at once, it's obviously better to be able to see, at a glance, which ones are on or off. The old way made that harder. Clearly you have never sat for half an hour tweaking a compressor, certain of the improvement it was making, only to realize the damn thing was in bypass the entire time.

I can see more Pro-oriented things in there than you: a redesigned channel strip that reorients itself according to signal flow. Meters that work. A scriptable MIDI processor. Flex pitch, or whatever they called it. I also see a crisper UI and a clever way to facilitate interaction with complex instruments and plugins (the Smart Control macro thingies).

Of course, I'm just an amateur, so I suppose my opinion doesn't count. I suspect that you are too, but perhaps I'm just more comfortable with it.

-----

EDIT: I guess my long-winded point is this: why does it matter whether you think the program is becoming 'easier to use' (the horror); all that should matter is whether the new features are meaningful to you, and whether it breaks anything you need at present.

I work in enterprise software by day, and our UX team is constantly looking to consumer software and devices for usability ideas. There is absolutely nothing inherently bad about making something difficult become easy to use. It cuts down on errors, makes people happier, decreases stress, and makes them more productive. All of these things are just as valuable in the studio as they are in the accounts receivable office. There is nothing 'pro' about making life difficult for yourself.

For MIDI work PT is several years behind Cubase, Logic and Ableton. Everybody has their own favorite. I've found Logic to fit my workflow very well and is not any less of a professional tool than the other DAWs I mentioned.