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You can run Ardour headless and control it 100% using OSC (from the command line, with oscsend, or from a touch device (phone/tablet) using eg. TouchOSC). You could also get significant but not as extensive control using MIDI.

> I am a software developer and musician who uses Linux and I do care about this. I run headless, and control my audio software through custom logic and hardware while playing live. I ended up writing a custom synthesizer and see because I couldn't find anything that works well for my use case

That's pretty cool. Most modern DAWs allow you to define per-controller triggers for custom logic in the form of MIDI events. I guess you could write a CLI that maps custom commands to MIDI events and allows you to send those events to your DAW when they are called. It's not exactly what you're describing (and maybe it doesn't fit your use case) but is that something you've considered?

There will always be tinkerers who write their own synths. Everyone else just uses serum or whatever and makes music.