No way to stop Home or Recent Project on launch?

I think the difference is that in AE you can go to the program screen and do something, (add a comp, work from scratch). PP seems to need a project, thus when you go to bare program screen, there's nothing to do, except open a project (new or existing), or using the help menu.

I take it that's a fundamental thing PP has since the beginning. So, not much point in not opening the Home screen, you're an ESCape key away from the raw, I can do nothing except open a project, but you can open a recent or easily create a new .prproj on the home screen.

It would be nice if there was something that matches After Effects' Preferences > Startup & Repair > Enable Home Screen or Photoshop's Preferences > General > Auto show the Home Screen.

If put in the form of a feature request (rather than an angry rant), I'd vote for it.

I'll add to the feature request link to add for a third option to not show anything. As stated before, other Adobe apps allow it to be turned off. In a studio environment with multiple editors on a server, "most recent" is a pretty useless to me. I use Premiere in full screen (which has its own bugs), so having the Home screen show up on another desktop is annoying. I wasn't aware of the Esc button to clear the home screeen away. For now I think I'll program a hot key on my StreamDeck to close the project and Esc as a single button. Its nice when you close out of something that you can be back to a clean desktop and not still having an app layer between you and the Finder in the case of OSX. 

Wow! For a new user... so negative and inflexible. I quite like the 'small hill to die on' comment.

BTW: you can simply press ESCape on the home screen and it's gone, all the while you can be heading for the FILE menu.

Also simply, you can keep desktop shortcuts for any project. It will be available and right where you put it each time.

While I don't necessarily disagree that it doesn't hurt to have the option. Unless I'm missing something, it seems like a fairly small hill to die on, so to speak.

V1 - Home screen: Click Premiere, Click on recent project or New Project (2 clicks)

V2 - No Home screen: Click Premiere, Click File, Move to Recent Files, Click Project. (3 clicks - same if starting a new project.)

V3 - Direct via Folder: Click Finder/Explorer, Click Project Folder (will assume it's favorited), Double click Project (3+ clicks)

Opening DaVinci Resolve I get the same type of home screen. I didn't see a way to turn that off either, but I don't know that software nearly as well.

These are the only options available I'm afraid. However, if you don't want to see any of these, just start by opening your Premiere project from Explorer/Finder and it will load straight into the project itself skipping welcome screen

just double-click on the project you want to load before launching premiere and away you go.