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A DAW session is like notes for writing a book. Not everything is going to make it in, and the choice of what does make it from the notes to the book, and how it's changed, is quite intentional. And I, personally, don't consider a book to be "lossy" or "unauthentic" because it doesn't also come with all the author's notes.Yeah, not really.
In music, for starters, a DAW session is like the recording reels from the analog days. And artists, producers, and studios go back to those reels a lot, for many reasons: to later clean up, rebalance, and release a "remastered version", to adapt to a new format (e.g. Apple/Dolby's spatial audio or some 5:1 surround mix), or simply to give individual parts to collaborators to make a remix of the track, or even just for the artists themselves to plunder it for parts to reuse in later works.
What your comment misses is that we're talking about the author here, not the reader.
The author (or in the DAW session case, the producer/artist) is the one who would be having the original format, and have a choice to keep their stuff as a ProTools session or wav stems, or as a text file or some proprietary format.
So while you "personally, don't consider a book to be "lossy" or unauthentic because it doesn't also come with all the author's notes.", the author would indeed be furious if we needed his notes and couldn't open them because he wrote his first book+notes in some editor/format since discontinued, and he now only has the final printed or ebook text.
>On a more technical note, underneath the hood, the recorded items are all stored as .wav files too...
Which is neither here nor there regarding the things I've mentioned as lost (e.g. the fx chains used with their settings for re-toggleability, sequenced notes, automation curves, and so on), and is also not generally true across DAWs, depends on the DAW whether they'd use some proprietary format.
