Mixbus is intended to be an emulation of Harrison's analog consoles and a tape deck. MIDI is an afterthought tacked on to it.
I have the regular Mixbus (Not 32c) and I think it is fantastic for mixing. Instead of a console emulation plugin, the WHOLE DAW is a console emulation.
I tried REAPER but it never just quite clicked with me. It is impressive, however. One thing I really do like is the way it can natively handle timing corrections much simpler than SONAR's old Audio Snap.
A long time ago I tried some version of Cubase and couldn't make heads or tails of it. Same with Ableton.