This is something that's been plaguing me for years. It got so bad that I started looking for another DAW to work with. However, it seems there aren't any other DAWs that work as specifically with MIDI events to the most minute details that I need it to in near as well a way as Cakewalk does. And it is wonderful at this. But I have many VSTi plugins that can accept Sysex and RPN/NRPN messages and some of their features are only accessible via these MIDI commands. Many synth emulator VSTi's and sound chip emulator VSTi's can accept Sysex and RPN/NRPN but because Cakewalk can't do that, some of these features are inaccessible in my projects because there are no GUI elements for them in the plugin itself. They're only usable through Sysex/RPN.
There are other DAWs that have this feature though so it's strange to me why Cakewalk never bothered adding this functionality. It is a crucial part of my workflow for the projects I'm working on. If I run these VSTs outside of Cakewalk and access them through a loopback MIDI driver then it works, of course, because Cakewalk has no problems sending these messages to a MIDI output port. But then I lose the ability to capture the audio output from those plugins back into Cakewalk for bouncing down. So it becomes a long and tedious process to somehow capture that audio and import it back into Cakewalk. Making changes is even worse. And forget about previewing because the latency for anything outside of Cakewalk makes that useless as well.
I'd really love to see this capability considered and added at least into the new Cakewalk Sonar if not in Cakewalk by Bandlab (since feature updates are being phased out as I understand it). Any chance of this happening, Cakewalk?