Here's the deal...(and I just realized that the way this is written might make it look like I have earlier posts in this thread. I don't. I'm jumping in right here.)
The reason that I think pros fear "dumbed down" isn't so much because they want something that is difficult to use, but rather because sometimes making difficult things easy makes things that were previously easy difficult, or impossible.
So just this week I had to help somebody with an iMovie problem. There was a part where they had 3 overlapping audio tracks. Movie audio, voiceover, and music. Try as they might, and try as I might, we could not get the movie audio to actually go away -- even though we had set it's volume level to "0%."
Oh...and did I mention that they're on a white iBook? Fine machine, but a little slow. So I copy their iMovie stuff onto an external drive so we can look at it on my Core i7 iMac instead.
Except iMovie on my iMac won't recognize the project on an external drive. I know that supposedly iMovie is supposed to...but it won't work. So I have to copy the files onto my iMac, and then iMovie magically sees them...because they're in the spot that iMovie wants files to be in.
Well the only way to get the clips to work right that I could come up with, was to actually run all their clips through Quicktime 7 and just delete the audio track off them. Voila! No audio track for iMovie to play, when it's not supposed to.
My point is that I spent 30 minutes dinking around with the "Easy" iMovie to do what would have taken me 10 seconds to do in Final Cut. (Select audio. Delete.)
And that's pretty much my experience every time I get lulled into trying to run a quick project through iMovie. Everything seems to be going well, I'm even sort of enjoying myself (Don't tell anyone), then I hit a snag or a wall...bump up into some limitation of iMovie that there isn't a very good work-around to...and wish that I'd just used Final Cut to begin with.
So while I agree that there are those who want pro tools to be difficult simply for the sake of having a high barrier of entry...
...I also think there are a ton of us that are just afraid that the cost of these new and handy features will be that some of the things we rely on doing, especially things that are a little "hackish," will become difficult/impossible. In the name of simplicity.
It's like my iPhone. I love it to pieces, and I don't plan to have any other type of phone any time soon, but sometimes I wish for a few more advanced features...features that are available (Usually through third-party tools) on Android. Instead I'm stuck hoping and wishing and praying that Apple will implement them.
