> This feels a lot more like computing in the 90s after taking an odd 25 year detour of an obsession with the tools themselves instead of what the tools can actually do.

This sounds more like the opposite of what you're saying. Music is one of my main hobbies too but I enjoy using a DAW to ... play and write music. Writing out specs and testing a new custom DAW seems closer to writing code in an IDE than playing music.

Like, professional electronic music artists spend 10s of thousands of hours in a DAW, but at that point it just becomes second nature and the tool disappears so they can focus entirely on the music.