Apple bought FCP from MacroMedia, and its internal design was a mess. You can see amateurish data-structure blunders if you look at FCP XML files. The UI also

Apple bought FCP from MacroMedia, and its internal design was a mess. You can see amateurish data-structure blunders if you look at FCP XML files. The UI also suffered from the asinine floating-window fad that afflicted the Mac for much of its existence, being a glued-together mass of individual windows that prevented you from minimizing, resizing, or moving the FCP UI. That was far from the only UI gaffe. Remember when footage would go missing, and you were presented with "Find" and "Locate" buttons right next to each other? WTF. But... you could get work done with FCP 7. No doubt about it. Apple cleaned up the floating-window mess with FCP X. But it failed to fix fundamental mistakes from the earlier version. Most crippling is its continued failure to distinguish between clips (media files, which reside in bins) and timeline events (sections of the clips that are used in the timeline). An event should always point to a clip. That makes it easy to (for example) apply an effect to all the uses of a shot, or to just one instance of it in the timeline. If you want to apply an effect to all uses of a shot, you apply the effect to the clip. Otherwise, you apply it to one or more tineline events. Easy, right? But you still can't do that in FCP X. To make matters worse, Apple misuses the term "event" to mean... I don't even know. Some kind of dumb iPhoto-like auto-organized group of media by date, I think. That's ignorant of industry standards and definitely not professional. Also unprofessional is FCP's overly "helpful" timeline. It's a chore to edit your footage with frame-level precision, which should NEVER be a problem today. And I have no idea why you couldn't open old FCP projects in X. Plenty of other vendors (and even other groups at Apple) wrote parsers to ingest that poorly-conceived XML schema and turn it into something useful.