I agree with most of this in that OTs FX are not great… but they are still somewhat workable - and you can always experiment adding a Neighbour track for stacking.
Regarding noise and the OTs inputs, it was particlarly bad in the OG but I feel they’ve improved this on the MKII, at least to my ears. There’s more overhead…
Nothing will ever beat dedicated ad/da’s though so its not ideal for mixing but it works great for live gigs etc.
Saying Abletons FX are worse… is a little far fetched. 
I’ve never had an issue with noise in the mk1, even with the outputs up pretty high the noise floor of mine is low enough that it’s irrelevant, in the sense that when I record I aim for peaks around -15dbfs at 24/96 and the It’s noise floor is low enough that it doesn’t even show up in a spectrum analyzer at those levels.
It probably varies with setup, and I wouldn’t be surprised if having it connected to USB raises the floor a LOT.
In general there’s not a whole lot of agreement about various aspects of the Octatrack, other than when you sum up all of its features and functions it’s more than the sum of its parts… Or you can’t stand it… 
I use the OT exclusively as an FX/Mixer, it sounds fucking bad ass ¯_(ツ)_/¯
You might want to reread what I wrote.
Well my point is that both OT and Ableton have terribly disappointing effects.
Link me to an audio example or didn’t happen.
Ok. I just read it again and not sure why I bothered
To repeat yourself, you are saying the OT has better effects than Ableton?
To repeat myself, that is absolutely ridiculous 
Some lofi/combs/flange/EQ/verb/delays, more subtle in this one, but yeah I like it
About two mins in this one I eventually start applying a lot of flange/delay/filter
Most of my soundcloud stuff here is drenched in OT effects.
I generally dont think of any effects as crappy though, they all do some cool trick.
how did you find syncing this?
I am trying to send the OB plugin audio thru OT and back to use OT as a send effect but the timing is quite far out (50+ms)
This means things like drums etc just won’t be able to be passed thru the OT without noticeable phasing etc
I got a different (Octatrack sending clock) but similar routing working by turning the metronome on in Ableton and OT then adjusting the clock sync delay in Ableton MIDI prefs until everything lined up.
It’s way more stable since trying it with bitwig though