There's some valid criticism here, which I'll put in our issue tracker.

However, you could have started with a screenshot of something current instead of 7 years old. Several if not many of the issues you've mentioned have already been addressed.

The problem with the UI/UX paradigm of "making common things easy to do and easy to discover while still making the less common things possible." in the context of a DAW is that what's common and less common depends a lot on workflow.

Specific details;

> Why are your In, Out, Solo, Audition, and Feedback buttons different colors from the other ones?

In, Out and several other buttons are tri-state, not bi-state, to indicate, for example "muted because you soloed something else" rather than "not muted" and "muted because you muted it". The Solo/Audition/Feedback buttons are global indicators that also function as buttons.

> You also have literally dozens of different button heights.

Vertical space is at a premium in a mixer-style layout, so many buttons are sized to fit their contents rather than have consistent sizing. And in general, we eschew "all buttons should be the same size" anyway, because we want to prioritize some and deprioritize others.

Ableton is much less busy, but also presents way, way less functionality in their mixer (compared to Ardour's, or a large scale mixing console, it's almost a toy). You can certainly argue that it offers the right level of functionality for most people, and that busying it up is a negative for most users. I'm not even sure I'd disagree with you, but we've tried to build software for the sorts of people who are comfortable with large scale mixing consoles (or would be, if they could afford one), rather than bedroom producers who get just what they need and not much more.

> Why do you shorten in some ways by removing vowels, and in others by brute truncation?

22yrs of user feedback, mostly.

> And compared to practically everyone else out there, Reaper's interface is really, really bad.

Although your explanation of why this might be could have some truth, the sheer number of people who love Reaper's interface really argues against the claim that there's some sort of "objectively bad" here.

> Then Fader and AuDynamicsPro are left-justified (And AuDynamicsPro is cut off because it's not getting resized). THEN all the parameters underneath (compression threshold -- again cut off in an ugly way, headroom, expansion ratio, etc.) are all centered again.

"Fader" and "AuDynamicsPro" are processor (plugin) names. The centered texts are parameter names (indicated here by justification, not just color), and the actual text shown there is based on the names assigned by the plugin, not by Ardour. We do not ever resize-text-to-fit, which I consider appalling UI design.

> Why are the console buttons (play/record/etc.) smashed together horizontally into thin strips, rather than giving them the standard width afforded to buttons of this importance?

Because a large fraction of the user base will use either (a) a control surface of some type to control these, or (b) keyboard shortcuts (the ubiquitous space bar, for example). Because of this they are not actually very important when it comes to mouse-ability, but play the role of indicators more of the time.