Increasing Delay with each Multitrack Ripple Delete, Slow Multitrack Editing

On this machine, Z selects everything to the end of session, and X selects everything to the end of the highlighted track. But yes, that's a good suggestion that I didn't quite get around to making (although I did drop a bit of a hint... 😉 )

Something that might help, that I've got into the habit of - I've made 'U' my keyboard shortcut for 'select clips to end of session'. That way I can quickly highlight everything and manually drag it to where it needs to be. It's a good time saver and has sped up my work flow. 

Audition is widely used, perfectly happily, for rapid editing of interviews, but generally I don't think it's used the way you are using it. You have to bear in mind that for a long time, Audition didn't do ripple-deleting anway. The norm is to use Multitrack view as a place to assemble clips, rather than do detailed edits on them, which would be done in Waveform view. The basic M.O. is to mark (cue) in and out points, convert the cues into cue ranges which you can then place directly into Multitrack view from the list itself. To keep track of this, you can give the individual ranges names.

Even if you have interviews on more than one track and you want to keep it all in sync, you can - but this requires a little advance planning to get everything into a single track that you can edit in Waveform view. But once you've got it sorted like that, it's actually easier to handle in Multitrack anyway, because you can keep the layout  relatively uncluttered.

The thing about Audition is that it's reasonably 'deep' - and there's generally more than one way to achieve the results you want. Some of what it can do is, admittedly, not blatently obvious, and there are still some slightly strange omissions. But generally there's a way to achieve the results you want without using ripple delete. Think track grouping and large block moves...

I've seen many of your comments on the forum @SteveG_AudioMasters_ and I was afraid you'd say this! Sadly after ages of investigating I haven't found a good solution myself even. I understand that this is a limitation of the software for now, and isn't something i'll troubleshoot my way out of. I wonder in the industry, pardon my inexperience, but what do people use to do rough cutting if not audition? 

You are not alone; there's another recent post here which appears to have a similar problem. As far as I can tell, looking at the common ground, this has to be an issue with ripple deleting, rather than anything else you're doing. The only comment I can make is that if you are ripple-deleting time out of a session with a lot of tracks in it, it's going to take a little time anyway (which is why I try to avoid doing it), but I agree - the time it takes shouldn't accumulate. In a way, it's a shame that it doesn't produce a crash, because it might then be rather easier to detect where the error is occuring.