Haha, go tell me about featured artists. In that list only Chase & Status, London Elektricity, Mefjus, Noisia and Zedd means anything to me in terms of sophisticated and advanced sound production. Most of them in that list are live acts. And only Zedd and Tiesto are in TOP100 DJ list. I doubt Tiesto himself writes his music though.
Only Studio One has payments in installments. But I think your biggest issue is that you are living in parallel reality and say what could have been instead of what is going on now. As soon as you can see what is actually happens in DAW’s users base around the world not only US, you will understand that I am right. Here’s some numbers:
YOUTUBE Subscribers:
Image Line: 385,507 subscribers
Ableton: 301,667 subscribers
Propellerhead: 150,403 subscribers
PreSonus Audio Electronics: 95,177 subscribers
Avid: 89,857 subscribers
Cubase: 67,131 subscribers
Major version release views:
Ableton Live 10: What’s New - 987,225 views
FL STUDIO 20 | What’s New? - 405,140 views
Propellerhead - Announcing Reason 10! - 291,223 views
What is New in Cubase 10 | Promo Video - 186,690 views
PreSonus - Studio One 4 Now Available - 78,957 views
Channel last video views:
Image Line - FL Studio 20.5 | In A Minute! - 40K views 7 hours ago
Propellerhead - PolyStep Sequencer Player for Reason - 24K views 1 month ago
Cubase - Understanding the Set-up Buttons - 3.9K views 3 days ago
Ableton - Sounds Like Tomorrow: Making Music for the Future | Loop - 2.3K views 5 days ago
Avid - The New User Experience & Interface - 1.7K views 3 weeks ago
PreSonus - What Does ATB Love about Studio One? - 1.1K views 4 days ago
Reddit:
ableton - 98,692 readers
fl studio - 88,302 readers
reasoners - 7,607 readers
cubase - 5,032 readers
studio one - 3,301 readers
protools - 3,964 readers
TOP100 DJ:
Martin Garrix - FL Stuio
Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike - Logic, Ableton
Hardwell - Logic, Cubase, FL
Armin Van Buuren - FL Studio, Studio One, Logic
David Guetta - Ableton, FL Studio, Logic
Sound Design: - request and daws on youtube, 5 results (biased to my past requests though)
how to bass growl - ableton, fl, fl, fl, ableton
bass reese - ableton, fl, fl, cubase, cubase, fl
how to skrillex - ableton, fl, ableton, ableton, ableton
hip hop beat - fl, fl, fl, fl, bitwig
how to record a song daw - reaper, pro tools, pro tools, pro tools, ableton
Google Trends
torrents - most downloaded release by name for the whole time
Steinberg - Cubase 5.1 x86 [23.11.2009] - 274,905
Image-Line - FL Studio 10.0.9c Signature Bundle x86 [6.03.2012] - 163,735
Propellerhead - Reason 5.0.1 build 1.472 x86 [3.12.2010] - 80,054
Avid - Pro Tools HD 12.5.0.395 x64 [04.2016, ENG] - 44,981
Ableton 8.3.4 x86 [3.09.2012] - 42,665
PreSonus - Studio One Pro 2.6.5 x86 x64 [2.12.2014] - 14,421
Conclusions
piracy is bad, piracy kills companies - 
PS: Nokia once died because they were too slow and not market-aware. It’s obvious what today’s trend is - electronic music, hip-hop, EDM. Not live acts recordings. Cubase once was the greatest DAW outside of USA, now it’s far far behind the companies that didn’t implement any dongles… with its hardly famous featured artists (imho).
PPS: mods will ban me for this message because they don’t want you know the truth. I always felt like this but when I googled the actual numbers I’ve discovered that Cubase are in deeper crisis then I thought.