The biggest innovation the DAW brought to the audio engineering world was a consistent VISUAL representation of sound. You could now use your EYES as well as your ears to engineer. The significance of this can not be overstated! The DAW solved one of the largest and most longstanding issues in audio engineering. That being, people's ears and listening situations are variable and imperfect. Every ear, headphone, speaker, room and listening position, sound different. Ears can get saturated and fatigued during a long session. Even the amount of coffee an engineer had that morning, changes how something sounds to them. Every day, a mix will "sound" slightly different. This variability made audio engineering a never ending subjective headache of mixing and listening and mixing and listening and re-mixing. All at the expensive of the client, who pays for all those studio hours.

The DAW solved all that. No more linear editing and NO MORE ENDLESS SUBJECTIVE EAR SHENANIGANS. This is why I facepalm where ever I see people using DAW based EQs with retro style interfaces. You know, the one's that have only analog style knobs, no real time analyzer display and only approximated numbering. It's re-injecting the vary problem that was solved over 2 decades ago. I guess a lot of engineers prefer the less efficient, more subjective mixing technique. Doing things purely by ear. It sure helps increase the studio hours spent on a project. You know, the time they get paid for, usually BY THE HOUR. Is that perhaps the real reason some engineers act like mixing by eye is sacrilege? Because it's so much faster and reliably accurate to mix with an active real time analyzer on. It also saves the client money. It is easier though to make money as an engineer, if you have to mess about subjectively for hours on end on a mix. In the honest world, we call that PADDING YOUR HOURS, for a higher paycheck. Like those people who park their service truck under a bridge for half the day, so they can get paid for doing more nothing than actual work.

"Mixing by eye is stupid! You can't mix what you can't hear!" is what some say. It's not like you turn off your sound when mixing by eye. You still have to hear and understand sound. It's just WAY easier and less time consuming to be able to SEE sound, as well as hear it. The unavoidable fact is, even when you can't HEAR a difference, you can still predictably SEE it on a real time analyzer. The cardinal rule of engineering is efficiency. Don't tell me it's better engineering spending an hour messing around subjectively over "If and where in the spectrum a guitar has an abrasive timbre", when you can just open any stock EQ's real time analyzer and see in seconds. Oh look, it IS there. Those are the frequencies. Click. Boom. Done. Fixed. Oh and look at that, we didn't have to spend an extra 150 bucks of the client's money, trying different retro EQs, searching for a problem by ear for an hour. A problem that sometimes doesn't even exist, because, YES, your room (as well as other things) can and will create "phantom" resonances that don't actually exist in the mix. That's how sound and the human ear work.

The other thing I see a lot is people acting like retro EQ plugins are better because the hardware they are modeled after is really good. The mistake is, it's not the interface that makes those pieces of hardware so good. It's the saturation and other behavior of the actual physical circuits. Once you make something a digital plugin, you aren't in analog anymore. Doesn't matter how well you "modeled it". It's not the same. So there's literally ZERO point to keeping the retro interface, other than pure marketing. Purists see a plugin with knobs and no analyzer graph and think, oh, it looks like the hardware, it must be good. Wrong. It's 1s and 0s. It may sound good, it may sound bad, but it's sound has NO connection to it's look. It's a program for shits sake. So there is LITERALLY no good reason from an engineering perspective, for the program to LACK a real time analyzer with visual display or accurate numbering.

Retro interfaces drive me nuts and get in the way of work IMO.