I've been feeling I need to gain at least some rudimentary knowledge with those tools as well. It seems a lot of sound design positions I've searching out lately label it as a requirement. I still can't afford a Kyma, but I use Reaktor. Lately I've also been learning to use CDP which has provided some great results. Bidule looks interesting.
Composers Desktop Project, A horrible to use set of sound manipulation tools that can produce excellent results. Especially so if you then go on to do some granular processing. It's used a lot by Electroacoustic composers. It was originally operated at command line level, but there are some GUI versions now that are somewhat usable. I think they're overhauling the GUI at the moment, plus someone did an alright looking implementation of it into Reaper. A typical window looks like:
Yeah, the offline processing can be a bit of a turn off. I would've never have adopted it myself but my tutor is an expert in it, so he was able to guide us through it efficiently. Once you get a feel for what each parameter does it isn't so bad, plus it's free.