surely your hobby can't be that expensive

IMHO Bitwig is a modular synthesis and sound design environment that also contains a full DAW. There's possibly nothing else quite like it around - I'm not certain, but I've looked and not found anything. Notes are events and can be processed or generated in all manner of crazy ways... or just played. Audio can be piped all over the place and processed almost however you want. I think of the stock devices like basic building blocks, like Lego or Minecraft. Once you understand the pattern you can build anything. There are so many ways to work in Bitwig! It's almost like Ableton but equally it's almost an unlimited modular synthesizer. It's very playable too, a real digital instrument. I could probably spend the rest of my life with it and not run out of things to try. It steers away from trying to be a virtual instrument rack like Reason with pretend jack leads, and seems to me to be both incredibly powerful and still very intuitive. It's the best music making software I've come across in 35 years of using music software!

You are wiser than I