people use gimp too. and i bet there are more gimp users than audacity.

as for the UI, i don't get it. what's so bad about it? and how is this one better? i looked at both and ardour too. so far audacity is the only one that has a feature to detect silence and label it. it's pretty easy to use too. i use this to detect chapters and create a chapter index for audio books. last one i did this week took only a few minutes, and most of the time was typing the chapter titles into audacity. i could not figure out how to do this in ardour or audiomass