Also the fact that Ableton has stayed independent (and bought Cycling '74, maker of Max/MSP) is IMO critical to their ongoing success...Compare to how Native Instruments and iZoptope are mere rent-seeking shadows of their founders' visions since PE/VC took over.

One of the features that got me hooked on Ableton Live was how easy it was to do "analog style" audio recording of whatever you're hearing in realtime...not bounce, render, or sample to another device (it can do all of these too). For the master bus - just create an audio track, arm for recording and set input to "Resampling". Can do the same with any number of tracks/groups. This is critical to me for capturing ideas in realtime and continually reprocessing/resampling as I go.

I was astonished when I first started making digital music 20 years ago that this isn't a standard feature in every DAW. Some DAWs (REAPER, Bitwig, AudioMulch) do this as easily, others (Logic, Reason) have workarounds.

Native Instruments is bankrupt, unfortunately.