> A wave editor window or panel separate from the main project timeline is however the industry standard, and as such it might be exactly the sort of feature which would be very at home in Ardour.

Already landing in Ardour 9. However, at present, since our editing is always non-destructive, you can't do much there other than move start/end markers. We'll likely be doing more work on variable realtime time stretching in the march towards v10, and that will likely be accessible from both the main timeline and dedicated editors (but we'll see).

And yeah, Ardour's current goal is much more focused on being a powerful tool for people who do this stuff a lot, but there are a variety of arguments that support the idea that we need to do something/more to support beginners. We'll see about that too.