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Reason is quite possibly the king of skeumorphic design, across all software categories and all time.

https://www.reasonstudios.com

For good and ill. Mostly good (I really love it), but treating knobs as weird faders is one place the metaphor breaks and it took me a long time to get used to it.

Yeah, I'm with you. The UI has a sort of fun appeal, but in practice it's not actually that usable when you know what you want to do and want to move quickly.

I don't believe that this is true. FL Studio had a bit of a dated 00's design for a while. Cubase, Reason, and Pro Tools were also not flat either. I'm not sure that "always" is accurate.

Though, Ableton has been flat since 1.0 it seems.

DAWs, maybe, but the VSTs that live in symbiosis with them have had (and a lot of them still do) the most skeuomorphic designs ever, replicating the look and feel of audio hardware.

Always?

I think it's quite the contrary. Look at the history of Logic, Cubase, Sonar, etc. For most of their time they didn't have flat UI. Ableton is the exception.