Yes I was, I was a few months old when he asked that

LOL

I'm well aware that this thread has not been in use since January, but 1) this is the apt thread for this question and 2) I feel that I'd appreciate what advice anyone can offer to go one way or the other, based on the workflow I am comfortable with.

To provide context to the images attached below, which are a list I've drawn up of positive, negative and neutral points about FL Studio 11 and 20+, this is my workflow at present:

1. I record all vox and live instruments on Audacity. I do have a USB audio interface (specifically, a Scarlett 2i2) but even with that, for the life of me, I've never successfully gotten FL 11 or 20 to record ANYTHING apart from MIDI off a keyboard.
2. I work on a shoestring. With the exception of live instruments and certain VSTs, including those I've recently won, most of my instrumentation consists of SF2s and default synths e.g. Autogun, Sytrus.... . In the past I churned out music on a regular basis because it felt like a breeze, but now I feel... stifled. Fruity Soundfont Player loads SF2s like a charm; DirectWave, which is what I use on FL20, buggers the note order up so badly that I basically waste precious minutes, even hours, faffing about changing individual note pitches. And external soundfont players aren't gonna cut it because the sampling length on both DirectWave and Fruity SF Player are on point -- which is something that I've not seen Sforzando or DSK SF2 do properly.
3. Up till last year I used FL Studio 11. What prompted me to make the shift to FL 20 was my inability to load many instances of Edison, when I needed to import WAVs of recordings into the playlist. Also, I was under the impression that I could collaborate with more people since more people use FL20 or later, but this leads me to my next point, which is...
4. No matter how many times I've tried, exporting a zipped .flp DOES NOT WORK on FL20 on all devices. At all. The last collaborative file, Estavius ~ Vocal Ver., was a nightmare to send over because FL20 kept crashing when it was about 90% done trying to export said FLP as a zipped folder. It is feasible to gather all my material from every corner of my computer and external HDD, but it is a soul-crushing process.
5. But FL20 has been instrumental for many of my larger projects; Stormfall, the track which won me AIM this year, would not have been possible at all on FL11 because of the sheer amount of samples I needed to load. Also, FL20's mixer objectively looks and feels better.
6. I've had someone inform me that x86 FL11 can be emulated on FL20 and I've even seen a video on how to do it, but I've had no success in doing so myself.

Anyway. I am torn. I've drawn up this long-ish list. Please feel free to interject if you see workarounds to any of the problems mentioned; they may or may not work on both my devices but I'll be sure to at least give them a try. I'm suspecting workflow problems are part of the reason why I feel like composing is a soul-destroying experience these days, and I'd appreciate a nuanced response on which to go for.

Sounds like an unacceptable situation to be in, honestly.

I'll just spring towards the obvious procedure and dare to ask if you've tried/done this and at what point does it prove to no avail? Without walking us through to the exact bit in the operation where critical failure occurs nobody is likely to smell a solution.

As a complete aside, don't those interfaces come packaged with like protools and ableton lite? If all else fails it won't set your drums on fire to give that a try instead, who knows might surprise yourself.

I may have found my workaround, but it's a bit of a precarious balance (BTW, I only just saw this reply -- apologies). I have now both FLS 11 and 20 installed for diffferent needs. Composing is fast on 11; mixing is fast on 20.

Recording itself. FL has stalled when I've tried to do so, and I haven't even gotten to the hundreds of vocal layers yet (to that end, I've just used Audacity with the Scarlett 2i2; it's lightweight).

No, I just got the interface in question secondhand, on its own (I even had to procure my own USB B cable, which, thankfully, we had, as a holdover from computing of the distant past).