Reaper is plain awesome. Robust and light software, highly customizable. The community/forum is vast and helpful. Many studios use it professionally and not just based on its affordability
Its stock mixing-tool plugins are underrated mainly because of the bland looking GUI, they're far from perfect but they're actually more than fine as long as you know what you're doing... and that has been proven several times in various mixing contests.
Its biggest downside at the moment is the lack of decent virtual instruments, which means you won't find good sounds in there to create music. You need to look for external VSTs, external sample libraries, sample players like Sforzando or actual samplers like the TX16Wx.
Start with freeware, a lot of nice stuff. Eventually upgrade to paid plugins if you like them and want to take it to the next level.
Other more expensive DAWs come with better sounds and plugins (and this is one of the reasons for the price gap), but at least as far as I am concerned, the best plugins and libraries come from 3rd parties anyway regardless of the DAW you use.
So if you want to go with Reaper and you're a beginner I would highly advise to follow the official tutorials https://www.reaper.fm/videos.php
Many people end up blaming the software because they don't get to know enough about it.