@Suiseiseki
>But you don't actually end up avoiding it, even when a suitable free software replacement exists that is only slightly less convenient?
I guess I could try something like that on Ardour, never really tried it there (also it feels clunky). You may be right, there might be a piece of software that does that right.

>On systemd/Linux, you're in for some audio pain, sure.
I don't even use systemd on my system. So far, pipewire is alright, it works very nicely with applications that work with JACK. ALSA isn't that great for low-latency stuff, like recordings.

As for LMMS itself, it's getting improved quite a bit (they recently added some neat plugins), but still needs work to use. I could try adding the features, but I'm not good at programming.

From your post, I can clearly see you haven't worked with audio before.