Ski,
You’ll probably get people more likely to help you if you don’t jump into the Final Cut forum and start bashing the software it’s dedicated to.
I’m from an AVID shop as well editing full time on FCP and I’ve found it “tweaky”. There are so many settings that if you don’t know what you are doing can make final cut run poorly.
As Walter said, there are major houses and tons of people using FCP…so people are having successes.
The fact that you aren’t means you need to either pay someone to come in and setup these machines for you, or patiently troubleshoot with the help of people like Jeremy, Shane and Walter (and several others) who have helped me a ton in troubleshooting my issues in transition from a PC and AVID.
-Jason