Why is there in 2014 still no easy solution for lowlatency?

[Harmonic Progression]

I know that some DAW software allows you to specify "direct monitoring". Or it used to. This would allow your audio interface to send you a dry signal back to your headphones, bypassing the processing being done by your DAW.

The drawback to this method is that you don't hear the exact same thing that your DAW is processing and recording to disk (delay, reverb, etcetera). Instead you only hear what's going INTO your DAW. Little differences that could affect the performer's timing if he/she could hear the processed sounds. You might play your guitar part a little differently if you're using reverb or delay than you would if you were just recording a straight sound.

Latency will probably always be with us. But we can reduce it by selecting smaller buffersizes when we are tracking audio input.

And latency doesn't affect us much once the audio has been recorded...and I believe that Ableton's own documentation for Live says you can increase your buffer size when mixing.