Price.
I'm a hobbyist musician. I pirated FL Studio in my college days, and then got out of making music for a while. When I got back into it, I had a decent paying job, less trust of random executables downloaded from the web, and a slightly better-developed sense of ethics. I checked out LMMS, which is free and was fun to mess around in, but I got some horrible full-volume stutter-freeze crashes, as well as plenty of "blink and it's gone" CTDs. A friend of mine mentioned Reaper, so I checked it out and decided it was worth the $60. And it's well worth it. I've had minimal issues with it, and highly recommend it to any other hobbyists. I'm not qualified to recommend it or not to pros.
So now it lets me dink around with synths and sample libraries, and re-record old demos from when I was in a band 20 years ago and we only had 4 tracks, and just have some fun with music. It rarely crashes for me and I've gotten 4.5 years and counting out of my purchase cost, which means it's quickly closing in on $1 per month.
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