I am also still using an older Audacity version. It works well when a full DAW is not needed.
For bigger works
Harrison Mixbus is nice, but not free. Mixbus is based on
Ardour which is free and open-source.
There were several forks of Audacity after the controversy.
Most of those forks seem to have converged into a new project:
Tenacity
(for those who don't speak software: a fork is a copy of source code used as basis for new development in a different direction. The ability to do this is is one of the many nice aspects of open source software)
My understanding is that the goal of Tenacity was to get rid of the issues people were unhappy about in Audacity and then continue to improve the product.
I have not yet tried Tenacity so can't say if it is successful, but there is development activity so at least there is hope.
beinhard