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I'll use it for whatever my new project is. I remember Mackie Traktion as the obscure daw that I forcefully dragged through a couple of commercial projects. (3 video sound tracks, a suite of tunes for an expo convention attraction, and 3 demos for an artist) It didn't hold up very well, but was functional. That was kind of fun. I'm thinking of locking down on the next entry level daw to take to the heights.

Price wise, Reaper's pretty cheap, but it's pretty well built so doesn't really qualify for this. It's also not very obscure. I already used Reaper for a bunch of projects anyway, and went so smooth I could have permanently stayed on Reaper. So the next one I'm thinking

Mixcraft (http://www.acoustica.com/mixcraft/)
energyXT (I have it, but haven't used it)
cakewalk Music Creator (seems just like crap)
n-track studio http://ntrack.com/ (doesn't look to obscure)
Bram bros Tunafish (http://www.brambos.com/archive.html), quite obscure. Not even supported any more
sony Acid music studio (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/musicstudio) More like nostalgia. Forgot they even still existed after sony acquisition
Presonus Studio One Artist.. see how far I can go without using the "studio" version. It's fairly full featured otherwise. Fairly standard layout so not so obscure.
Ardour 3.. now has MIDI I think but I need to run it in linux. Standard layout, requires custom build for vst support. Pretty obscure and kinda freaky to setup. Too bad Mixbus doesn't support MIDI yet
MultitrackStudio, I don't know where this one came from http://www.multitrackstudio.com/ The strange interface seems unusable
Tracktion 3 - still as obscure as ever, and still alive.
Mulabs - standard looking.. wait no, it's got a modular environment built in? It's a basic set of modules, but this seems really cool.

I'm pretty sure Mulabs fits the bill, but if anyone has other obscure daws that are sub $100, please let me know. Remember, obscure, and functional. (and preferably cool or geeky or both) Not obscure and broken like LMMS.

http://www.rmllabs.com/SAW.htm

This is around since 1993, and still "rocks"
I cannot remember nothing most obscure than this.

My first demo was with a pentium 60, with Saw Classic, and 2 Sound Blaster 16 (there was no full duplex at time!)... it was 1993/94 I guess.

A few classics :

http://forums.planetz.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=30910

For just MIDI, there is still nothing that compares to KeyKit. Like a programmer's modular midi creation/recording/manipulating suite. I'd argue it's a DAW, or maybe at least a D"Midi"W.

It also has a black-box recorder, that is always recording. So you can go back in time and grab anything that happened, ever. If you know how.

http://nosuch.com/keykit/

oh yeah, I remember SAW. Pretty capable back then, I wonder if it kept up with the times. Also, wasn't it audio only? But guys, these are just "old" lol, which kind of makes them obscure but I'm looking for something with at least vst support so I can actually do some projects. (which is the end goal)

the keynote UI looks hot. Almost like machine schematics.

Bitwig (in beta) and Studio One are the biggest attention getting late entries into the "DAW" category that I'm aware of. The basic studio one is obviously not going to support any external plugins, but would work fine if you're going to do a lot of sample based work/loop based work & self recorded audio imo. Bitwig is trying to out-Live Ableton, but who knows when that will be stable let alone shipping.

As for Ardour, if you want a windows option that has some interesting "limitations" in terms of mixing structure, there's always Mixbus by Harrison. It supports VST plugins & Windows, but I'm not sure about plugin hosting. Might work well with VSL Pro which a lot of people use to ease core loading issues in the 'normal' DAWs anyway.

Anything else is more a FLStudio/Reason competitor rather than a 'full fledged "DAW"' imo,

USine is one of the few 'host' aka 'modular environment' apps that's caught my eye recently: http://www.sensomusic.com/usine/

Yeah, Usine or even Bidule are relatively obscure, but I don't consider them 'dumbass'.

G

Oh right.. Usine. totally forgot about them. I have a license, and was about to plunge into a project with it, but at the time it wasn't complete. Maybe I should revisit. I really like their concept.