If I was a UX student looking for something to redesign Ableton Live is one of the last programs I'd ever look at - it's a classic of UI design. If you want to show off your UX chops, choose something that's broken e.g. 95% of the software in the world.
It's much harder to make changes to an already good design. I don't think he was throwing out the baby with the bath water, they were fairly subtle changes overall.
