Reaper's piano roll editor isn't all that much different from a step editor except it's more flexible and powerful. If you really really want to only see one row of notes, you can just hide all the rest. MIDI item looping in the arrange window works very much like the pattern based arranging in FL.
The biggest hurdle starting from scratch is finding decent sounds. FLStudio (and most "big name/big money" DAWs) comes with a bunch of really decent synths that both sound pretty good and have relatively accessible user interfaces. Reaper comes with a bunch of relatively ugly and unintuitive but reasonably functional pieces that you can hack together into something that can sound pretty cool if you're into that whole "modular synthesizer, spaghetti wiring" thing, but to make that actually work you also need to have a pretty thorough understanding not only of underlying synthesis methods but also the routing and modulation systems in Reaper itself.
So you've got to go find those things. As mentioned above, there are a lot of really good free options out there, but you kind of need to know what you want. We've got a few threads around here about where to look for good free VSTis, but they really are just long lists of options. Maybe we could start a thread of people's recommended "starter kit" synths? Maybe even like "FL (Cubase, Sonar, etc...) has this, this, this and this, and here's the one plug I recommend in place of each".
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