Also, every tool in the toolbar is relevant in the editor window, so there’s no shrinking it there (which is the only place where it shows up).
And then also, everything in the “transport bar” is relevant no matter what window you’re looking at, and removing the few “slightly less relevant” items when looking at e.g. the mixer or cue page would be a pretty marginal change, I think.
I definitely recommend Ardour (especially based on Debian-based multimedia distribution LibraZiK Studio) to my students at a German university:
We are a non-commercial university - so I would never recommend a commercial product to my students.
We deal with radio and podcast production - and as far as I’m concerned, Ardour is nearly perfect for professional radio work.
It’s a pity: Many amateur musicians at least here in Germany, I suppose, don’t outgrow the prejudice that a non-commercial DAW wouldn’t be appropriate for amateur or semi-pro tasks.
I use Ardour because I came to Linux around 2011 after experience things I didn’t like in windows 7. I began to edit audio for A/V purposes first in Audacity and its destructive workflow and then in Ardour that I fell in love immediately. I use it ever since and always recommend Ardour because it is:
Stable and fast. Always worked smoothly, even when is used to run it in an old laptop and freezing everything track. All the crashes I had was caused to third party plug-ins.
VERY comfortable. It has an awesome GUI that always worked awesome both in the 1366x768 LCD display from my old laptop and the dual monitors I have nowadays. The default (dark) theme is just perfect. The GUI doesn’t have white portions or misaligned fonts or even over colored things to distract the user. Reaper, in contrast and off-topic, always made me feel like I needed to wear glasses and I experienced themes crashing in smaller monitors, maybe due to a lot of items made out of .png files, who knows.
Have built-in (effective) plug-ins that are already mentioned in the Features page. I particularly love the ACE Compressor when I need some transparent compression or with sidechain or autoduck other tracks. Lots of applications.
Had MIDI improvements that makes me comfortable to recommend Ardour to anyone.