I was on the fence about Waves for some years, then about six months ago I gave them a try (Scheps Omni Channel) at a sale.
I liked the workflow/ergonomics and thought the plug sounded fine when i tried it on various material the next couple of weeks.
Recently my band hired a pro engineer (who does it for a living) to come and record us at our rehersalspace/studio and set all plugs for us etc.(something that i would recommend all to do). The engineer was delighted to find the Scheps Omni Channel and used it extensively for a couple of hours - until it crashed, and there was nothing to do to get it working, it kept claiming there was an auth-problem and left the pc unresponsive.
This is a offline pc that *never* crashes. We had to start Reaper with offline fx, and as soon as the Waves-plug was activated it crashed. Many solutions was tried but none worked - other than removing the offending waves plugin.
The engineer did the mix with mostly Reaper plugs - btw we have never sounded better
After that I'm done with anything resembling online authentication and usb-dongle-ish shenanigans. Either trust me with a authentication-file, serial etc. or I will trust that something goes horrible wrong at the totally wrong time.
-W