Premiere Pro 14.1 - Unusable After Update

but one of the great things about adobe is that you can keep working in the previous version or 2 and still install the latest update for new projects.   Also, keeping an eye on this forum is a great way to get a sense of whether it's time or not to update.

Because I provide support for other editors who are on various iterations of Premiere, I've got 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 on my system.  It can get a little tricky if you try and launch a project by double clicking on the project file... but you'll either get a "this project was created on a later version of the app" or "do you want to update this project to a new version of the app."  

I understand your frustration, but you should never do a major update until you have some time to iron out the kinks so you can avoid this kind of situation.  I've been working with NLE's for many, many years and this has always been the case and it's only gotten worse.  Back in the day Avid sold a "turnkey" system with all your hardware and software so theoretically they could test an update on the limited number of configurations that existed.  And things still would often go south after an update...  

And the mantra in those days (and still is for some people) was Never Update in the Middle of a Project.  Of course, I'm always in the middle of one project or another, so I could never update....

And Adobe's schedule of major updates doesn't seem out of the ordinary to me given the pace of change in operating systems and hardware.  I'm constantly amazed at the number of posts here about problems that turn out to be the result of variable frame rate videos.  Being an old f*rt, I don't think vfr is a professional format, but obviously it is.   

As far as the minor updates go, those are usually bug fixes which is another reason NOT to dive in at the deep end of the pool right away.

Be thankful you only lost 4 hrs.

Roll back to a previous working version to get the work finished.