Cubase has consistently been at the top of the Overall Rating of the Digital Audio Workstation Software Shootout (DigitalMusicDoctor.com is for sale | HugeDomains) for several years, though some cheaper products with lower rating better it in Value Ratio. Which means that if you want the best, it costs more!
For example, Cubase 5 has an Overall Rating of 4.7/5.0 (the hoghest) and FL Studio 9 has 3.0/5/0, but due to price, FL gets a Value Ratio of 1.51 compared to Cubase’s 0.94 (third). But FL has whole categories where it has no functionality, so it may be good value, but unusable for surround (as is PT9 and AL8) and video, as well as having poor file management, MIDI recording and editing.
Generally, Cubase has very few low-scoring areas, and many of those seem to have been addressed by C6. C5’s worst area is Video (3.0), whereas all others are at least 4.3.
The link above goes to the summary page, but there are hundreds of sub-categories by which the products are rated. It is interesting to see how many other packages have big holes in their functionality. For some reason, Reaper has not been rated.