Yes!

The developer is pretty insistent on saying that Reaper is NOT free but also that stupid licensing schemes for other DAWs like the horrid iLok and others only punish people who actually buy the software, which is self-defeating since the pirates are unaffected by the ways in which the tool is made worse for people who actually bought the tool legally.

I bought it simply because of how incredibly refreshing this was, free open source DAWs have gotten better since I did but there used to be barely any accessible, lowcost ones that were fully featured enough to be useful. Now there are open source options like Muse and LMMS but the thing about Reaper is it isn't a budget/hobbyist DAW, in many ways it is an industry leading software so even with good FOSS DAWs out there Reaper is still well worth it.

In specific, a lot of people use Reaper for live performance of software instruments as Reaper is an efficient beast at running complex chains of software effects efficiently.. and yet a lot of people also use Reaper for mixing and production because it has such high quality audio processing capabilities. Reaper is a behemoth.