its a powerful program, make no mistake. The bundled effects and synths are also of high quality. Its workflow however is somewhat different than the rest of the established DAWs – as is Ableton Live’s however. My main “concern” with FL studio is that around halfway its “evolution” the added features made it a bit unintuitive and cumbersome to work around in it with all the windows, sub menus, choices, pattern vs song and whatnot. And I was always pissed off that the “tracks” are not directly related to the channel mixers like the rest of the DAW world.
My honest opinion would be to try the demos of both the programs – give around a month on each one and try to make a simple track in each one of them. This will definitely clear up some of your questions and hopefully help you decide which one is more suitable to your way of working.
As for “sound quality” – a question that usually pops up – rest assured all today’s DAWs are equally capable of producing quality sounds – my honest advice to any beginner would be to not take extremely seriously any advice coming from a person that states that DAW X “has better sound” than DAW Y. At best its biased, at worse its “fan-boy-ism”.
😉