I tried using a DAW this year, and it is ballz for midi.
It's a shame because I also played with a couple soft synths that I ended up liking a lot.

I have two well worn mc-50's that do a better job, and I use a korg ddd-1 to sync midi to tape when I have to (utter PITA).

If you use MIDI hardware with a DAW, gewt a Highly Liquid USAMO. It works really well, you end up with one MIDI output port with as clsoe to sample-accurate timing as the MIDI spec is capable of. They also have a line of modules that can give you a lot more ports but that gets expensive fast. unless you have a lot of hardware a USAMO or two should be plenty.

Or get an older MPC with a SMPTE chip installed (if you find an MPC2000xl you can get a SMPTE chip new for about $10 on eBay; I think the regular 2000 needed something proprietary that's way harder to find but I'm not sure because I've only had an XL) and just slave it to the computer that way and sequence on it, because that's probably better than a DAW anyhow.\An6y ol d80s or 90s hardware sequencer with SMPTE sync is going to outperform just about any MIDI interface made in the last 20 years when it comes to timing.

USAMO is excellent, though.

Also, MIDIsizer makes a clone of the old Mutable Instruments Midipal called the MidiGal that has a MIDI jitter correction firmware and that works well but for me, on an older Window 7 system, the jitter was so bad that the MidiGal couldn't actually correct it. It's still great for all kinds of other things though, and pretty easy to build from a kit (which makes it fairly cheap).

Softsynths are actually fine in a DAW if (and only if) you don't use a hardware controller. As long as you're 100% in the box, MIDI timing is great. It's the way Windows and MacOS handle MIDI data streams over USB that fucks it all up.