Having bought and upgraded Vegas & Cubase, and evaluated Reaper (which is $0 for cripple-free evaluation & $60 for a non-commercial license) I am fully aware of the cost. Winamp (made by one of the guys behind Reaper) was free, even before AOL bought Nullsoft, and still managed to look better than every other MP3 player out there.
There are people who have offered their services, presumably free of charge. I think Audacity would be a lot more inviting if more effort was put into the look and usability of the interface. Need money? Come up with a plan and a Kickstarter page.
I'm not saying it should be a DAW. I'm just saying it should look like something that was released in 2012, rather than something that was released in 1998.
Audacity doesn't attempt to be a fully-featured DAW. It does what it does, and it does it nicely. Not sure you can compare it to the others with a straight face. If you're recording a podcast, I'm sure it's fine.
Reaper's license only costs $225 for full commercial use exceeding $20,000 in revenue. Otherwise it's $65 for the exact same software. Not a bad deal at all.
