Project Manager needs a lot of work

I am on Windows 11 23H2 and Premiere Pro 24.0.  The issue I am battling is with Project Manager.  I used to have no issues with project archive on Premiere Elements, but Project Manager I have nothing but issues.  I am also bringing you this as a senior Android Dev who has written and maintains a video editor for a client on Android using the latest ExoPlayer.  The inffeciency and confusion here is baffling to me as a user and a dev. 

So to start, Project Manager opens in a dialog, then Project Manager Progress opens it's own dialog with the most useless information possible there.  Any error message propegating are in the views below apparently because they don't actually alert you until it is done or you hit cancel and the progress dialog goes away.  This makes no sense because it is slow anyway, so if it locks up and you don't know there is an error, you are just wasting time.  As for the progress dialog, it's not that hard to monitor progress when encoding, so why is it so basic of UI for the user.  At the very least it should show "transcoding media 4 of 400 or something.  Audio lightning fast, so the hiccup has to be video.  Since quite a few clips in my video aren't being changed and the output for them is the same, they shouldn't be transcoded at all, right?  I really feel like this area should probably be the most user friendly area in the whole app, so why isn't it.  

The last consolidation I ran was on a 350GB project of 4k video.  It said it would compress to like 37GB on that run, but actually compressed to 700GB and only after 5hrs could I then see the stream of errors saying it couldn't figure framerate or video size on anything.  Wait, what, that's literally the easiest thing ever to determine.  

I am literally willing to talk to anyone there by phone or whatever about this anytime because I'm a dev first, and have a YT channel second.  My hardest thing for my channel shouldn't be compressing a project.