(sometimes i feel this ‘hegemony’ is easier to deal with, if i redefine the word “DAW” to mean “Digital Audio WORKFLOW” instead of “Digital Audio Workstation”… workflow helps me envision the longer-term future, whereas ‘station’ causes one’s imagination to go… well… 'station’ary 
)
i’ve come to the conclusion at this point in my life: words are always completely subjective, and there’s never any absolute definition to any word in existence.
for example:
very true. but then again, a ‘novel’ will not always be the ‘optimal’ way to tell a ‘story’(<-see this sentence carefully, everyone will have a different meaning of ‘novel’, ‘optimal’, and ‘story’).
on norns, we have this app, ‘shicksalslied’ by @WilliamHazard …it feels like both a word processor and a digital audio workstation. if in one moment, i get creative in a way that feels like a novel, then it’s a ‘novel’. and if in another moment, i get creative in a way that feels like i produced some music(in this digital environment of a norns), then it’s digitally produced music and this was my digital audio workstation.
you might define a ‘novel’ as something in a particular way, but history is full of authors who have been ‘misunderstood’(i still try to read ‘Maldoror’ to this day, still have trouble with it… and the ‘writing’ is quite skilled in its descriptiveness, very entrancing in its emotive draw, but do i get it fully? no… yet who am i to say that’s not a novel?) so if i say something i made on ‘shicksalslied’ is a ‘novel’ and other people say, “we don’t hear the ‘words’? how is this a ‘novel’?”… it’s a similar problem: they failed to understand how i processed these words. that’s all it is.
and thousands of years from now, ‘digital audio’ might become a retro trend “ooooo! damn! i miss the warmth of that digital aliasing, all these ‘quantum audio workstations’ got such a thin sound to them, as if there’s light-years of distance between each layer of the mix 
” 
i guess i’m writing this to make the overall point: nothing is better or worse off, ever!
Music is in an even worse situation
it’s always evolving, so if a seemingly worse point in history just ends up leading to a better one anyways, who’s to say it was actually worse in the first place?
(also music and audio was harder to evolve than text because it’s more abstract; i think this is because it was left more creative whereas text was turned more quickly into more practical uses very early on in human history: we needed language to be very logical so that ‘fair trade’ could be negotiated most easily to ensure survival… the more general idea of ‘audio’ and ‘music’ never was chained to such a finite and specific utility so the tools will naturally remain a bit more nebulous)
newer contexts will redefine the tools, and then the contexts in turn will keep being redefined. it’s just evolution.
