I didn't mean to imply that I'm no longer excited by a new DAW. We're in the middle of adding clip launching to Ardour right now, and that alone is fairly exciting. What I meant was that I don't really detect much excitement in the world from the emergence of a new DAW, and what I do see mostly comes from people who don't seem to actually know very much about existing DAWs. There are way more people talking about Blender 3.0 than anytime a new version of any major DAW is released.

If you asked me, Blender is just insanely good at marketing itself. When it comes to software, having good marketing and sales is always more important than the quality of the product. The Blender team knows this and is very aggressive when it comes to keeping their product in the news. This worked in their favor even in the early days when there still were a few other open source 3D tools that had a chance of growing up to become seriously useful. These projects were starved out by drawing attention away from them. Twenty years later, that space is dominated by Blender so forcefully that there is zero room for an alternative, even as an underdog.

I would frame it more as community building. Which is probably much easier if your potential community is 10x as large.

That isn't quite correct. The Blender team did and does more than just the usual community building. They are more actively seeking attention from media than other open source which I am aware of.