FOr years I've been pissing about with Cubase which is a totally sound program in many respects but is deadly boring and takes forever to get anything done, Rewiring Reason helped a bit, but I finally took the plunge and bought Live 6.
I am still a total novice so be gentle, but fun with a capital F and sounds great, I don't know why people criticize Live's rendering, I used compression/limiting judiciously and finalized in Soundforge 8 with Voxengo Soniformer compressor and Voxengo Elephant 2.5 limiter.
http://u-r.dmusic.com/
click on the song called 'Transcendental Void'
Live will eventually rock my world, this first effort is rough around the edges and I needed a lot of manual help but hell, it took me 6 months to record a tune in cubase, it took 6 hours in Live !!