Hi Brent.
I agree that there are a lot of things that Pro should work on. I have to make a hundreds more keyboard actions a day, than I did with Avid. And with Avid, I could hit the trim button on an audio track, play the audio until I heard my out point, and the trim was set automatically. A great tool.
In Premiere Pro audio, I have to modify every audio clip manually, even when I set up audio prefs ! Crazy.
I think that the Premiere Pro software folks should spend a season in an edit bay doing network projects to really understand what we need, like borders on a pic in pic section. With Avid, you can very easily add borders of all sorts after altering picture size. Pro can’t without adding a lot more work.
But Pro has the export in cue mode which is GREAT and deals seamlessly with mixed video sources. Avid cannot, at least as of 12 months ago.
And Avid never fixed extremely long QuickTime exports at H264, the title tool is a mess, and their help line crew is a -10 in their ability to actually help.
Avid and Premiere Pro both have great tools with a lot that can be improved, and I wish the two systems could do a melding of the best virtues of each.
Good luck with your projects, and yes it is great to have a skilled asst. editor