You didn’t get had. I’m a big supporter of Cineform – going from HD Connect (Vegas) to Aspect and now Prospect. Cineform rewrites the preview engine of Premiere and it will run their codec in real time – not just one track but several. This is huge if you ever tried running HD footage in Vegas. That alone would be worth the money.
But the other thing is that Cineform is an editable codec that withstands multiple renders virtually lossless. (Read the website.)
I started with Cineform 2 years ago. I don’t plan on going to anything else in the foreseeable future.
Jerry