no way, its better than 2.5 because of the combinator and the mastering suites. Its really painless to make your stuff sound exceptionally clean with the imporovments they put in the program. Reason will never have vst support anyways, the company seems to be dead set against it. One down point is the combinator and mastering racks take up alot of CPU space of you are using alot of them but they sound great. If you have an older versian of it you might as well get the upgrade, its only 120 bucks or so.