I'd argue that Audacity (audio recording/editing/processing suite) is a little different niche than Reaper (full-fledged DAW). If your use case is "I'm doing a podcast and I need to do an audio recording from multiple mics and mix them down", Audacity is good enough that there's no point in paying extra for a DAW. If you're a musician and you need to mess nondestructively with recordings and MIDI and filters, then you know you need to go bigger.