Ardour is indeed pretty good. I’m a Reaper guy, which is incidentally available on Linux as well nowadays, so on the DAW and audio interface front, I’m all covered. If anything, my older 2i4 runs slightly more stable over Linux/Pipewire than it does on Windows with the official driver. I’m more on the composition/production side of things (amateur, although I do have a very small amount of professional experience), it’s mostly the amp sim and virtual instruments landscapes that left me on my appetite a bit last time I tried. There just weren’t many option and they all frankly sounded like crap. Maybe that got better since then, I don’t know hehe.
The answer is very location dependent, and often multifaceted. However here in Canada it’s a combination of neglecting affordable housing construction for decades, a huge uptick in immigration raising demand in some areas, a total lack of political willpower (most of our MPs report housing income, many actual landlords), and an economy that’s over-leveraged on real estate in general.