Robert,
As a disclaimer, take my comments with the "attenuating factor" that I have been working for NI for more than 15 years. But reading your post compelled me to share something personal with you (and the others reading this)
Hang on with me here - I actually have a point to make.
In my previous life I did my research in extracting some features (for me to define ) from visual evoked potentials in search for early Glaucoma detection. When I started my research I used Pascal + Data Translation DAQ + MATLAB + Word + Excel. I remember when Windows came along NI was the only company with a DAQ board with a driver for Pascal for Windows (I bought it). Pascal got limited and I started to explore C. The GUI side of C was not as nice as they are today and someone introduced me to LabVIEW. At the time I stated to use it for data acquisition only and after the experiments I moved to the other analysis package, to the visualization package, and then to the reporting package. It was a well defined streamlined process but still a lot of it "off line" and labor intense.
As I started to create my experimental dashboards in LabVIEW, I realized that by observing dynamically my data as it was being acquired I could visually extract a lot of information from my EEG data (humans are amazing pattern recognizers). I naturally started to add some basic signal processing to my code and display the processed data in real-time. I not only learned that LabVIEW is extremely rich in signal processing and analysis functionality but also that the way I used these functions abstracted me from their complexity. It was like having a "black box" that applied the desired transformation to my signals. I started to explore other functions I was a bit afraid of like wavelets, joint-time frequency, Gabor expansion etc...I also got rid of my (i,j )syndrome (you know what I mean).
In short, we are inclusive, and would like to provide you a simpler path for you to use your tools of preference (we are continuing to do that). But maybe it is not too late to considering learning this extremely productive platform.
Newton
