Final Cut Pro X is essentially a new product - it's rewrite, in 64-bit Cocoa, Core Media, Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, etc, etc, etc.
Apple took a long, hard look at FCP (which has only incrementally changed in the last several years) and took the opportunity to overhaul its UI, workflow and feature set.
Necessarily, things will be radically different and confronting to users who have been used to the same product in the same way for a decade.
To get a v1.0 product out the door, you inevitably have to make compromises, and FCPX has numerous limitations as a result. But I'm sure they are already working on the next revision which will address the most urgent of these.
Also I think that many people do not really understand the new features and workflow yet.
A lot of people are always gonna complain about any major changes to their workflow. I can sympathise with that. I sure reacted with shock and revulsion to Office 2007 and Vista. Now I'm kind of used to it.
But even if FCP X is a failure like Vista, it's not like it's the main product of the company, far from it.
That's not the point. I'm not an FCP user but from reading the threads there I can hear the screams of betrayed and abandoned professional users. You don't screw around with pros like that. Imagine Apple telling you that HyperCard was how you had to code for iOS and did away with all the detailed control you had when using professional methods currently available. I think your screams might be even louder. [typo edit]
Did Apple consciously move down from the highly specialized Pro market to the larger Consumer market because it has a larger total number of users?
If this is the case, then yes the highest end users will be disappointed but hundreds of thousands of new potential users would now find this software accessible?
iMovie is still the product aimed at the consumer market.
But the cut-down Express edition is no longer; it was probably too much engineering effort to create two editions and get such a complex product out the door.
They lowered the price to make the product appear to a broader market, and to cover the Express-Pro spectrum. I'd say it's an aggressive move that makes it more accessible. Surely people are not complaining that it's more affordable?
Apple took a long, hard look at FCP (which has only incrementally changed in the last several years) and took the opportunity to overhaul its UI, workflow and feature set.
Necessarily, things will be radically different and confronting to users who have been used to the same product in the same way for a decade.
To get a v1.0 product out the door, you inevitably have to make compromises, and FCPX has numerous limitations as a result. But I'm sure they are already working on the next revision which will address the most urgent of these.
Also I think that many people do not really understand the new features and workflow yet.