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Neil,
Adobe Premiere CC has been around for 15 years plus and yet it STILL runs like a Beta release on the Mac (By FCPX's second update, within a month or so, it had corrected all it's bugginess). This, in my opinion, shows an absolute disregard for the Mac user. Now, this may be a result of the Apple vs. Adobe war. I don't know. But, I do now, that this is a major screw up. But, it's not just the crashing cause when it crashes ( this issue MAY have been corrected in the last update) it has been breaking links to source clips. This is another major screwup. This issue has effectively ruined the entire organization of my bins in a feature project I've been working on for months, such that finding my back from the timeline to the source clip folders -- all carefully organized -- is no longer two-clicks away. What a mess! And then there is the myriad ways of losing things when one is dragging things. The oh so many gotchya's. The silliness when doing such common tasks as copying parts of the timeline (why can't I copy in to out?). The endless number of preferences (a throwback to 7 and Avid). I can edit 4K on X with ease and if I'm on an older iMac, I can easily create Proxies with one click and work with those. But, I can't create proxies in CC without creating them OUTSIDE of CC and going through about 10 steps (eegads) and cant easily switch back and forth. A nightmare. In X it's ONE click to create and one click to move back and forth. ONE CLICK. With Premiere I face a hyper-busy screen of buttons and doodads. Darn if looking at my project in Premiere doesn't make my eyes hurt after a half, not to mention hours of use.
As for intuitive and the different pov's on this. Well, all I can say, is that as an instructor of FCP7 and FCPX and Premiere, it takes me about 20% of the time to teach FCPX compared to FCP7 or CC. Trust me on this. In many ways X has adversely affected my training business cause it so darn easy to learn. I won't bore you with the details of how superior X is to CC or Avid, but it isn't even close. X is superior in countless ways. It's the pro's stuck in their mindset based on the first release of X, which lacked many important features, that keeps Avid and CC alive. That , and the fact that Apple is perceived as becoming the Microsoft of the day. That you have issues figuring out how to start the Mac makes me realize how stuck people are on their mindset. As a CC and X user on professional projects, I know them both quite well and I would never ever choose to use CC on anything. There is NOTHING it does better than X... except crash 
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You may be right that Apple may not supporting the workstation with the attention they once did. But, let's be real. Apple built it's company on the graphical user interface. And their interfaces still blow away the competition. Yea, they may be more expensive than the competition's open architecture, but with their closed system comes a robust stability that can not be touched by the Windows world. If the colorists want to change to Windows, big deal. Apple has NOT built a color correction tool to compare. But, give them time...
In a word, CC is a mess compared to the tight intuitive X as for as interface design and functionality. It's Byzantine CC/Avid versus Bauhaus X. And incidentally, you are absolutely right about Resolve and its nifty editing system. It's limited but sweet. Guess what? It's a rip off of X.
Always enjoy 'hearing' a skilled user of a different tool. MIght be even interested in trying it, if I wanted to go buy a five-year old mobo machine. That costs a heck of a lot more than the rig I'm using that works just fine ...
My point about the intuitive-ness and a couple times not being able to puzzle out a Mac, was meant as pointing out that though I've been told countless times anyone without any computer experience can just sit at a Mac and go ... well, that's maybe sort of true for some. But not for everyone period ...
And Apple hasn't done anything of note for the workstation computers in several years. Life has moved on ... Big Macs, not so much.That's why some very Mac-centric total "I got every Device Apple ever made" folks in the colorist world are building Pc's. They don't want to move away from Apple ... but they can't stay with it and keep up with the fast shifting material they've got to work that's coming their way. I've teased a couple about it ... two years ago, no WAY they would ever even think of checking PC specs out. They were rather vocal about the Superiority of the Mac Ethos. Perhaps even ... a bit arrogantly so, perhaps?
Now ... one's already installed his first PC Beast ... and is thrilled with the performance. Another's about ready to jump, and been studying planning out which bits & pieces he needs ... and those dudes run complicated setups between external boxes feeding monitors, scopes, projectors, and bazillion-bit network cabling and such. Many input devices, all that sort of thing.
Have no basis for anything but finding the discussion of working in FCPX interesting. Would love to see you work it at some point, but then ... chance of that is ridiculously low, right? I'd be fascinated, though ... probably more in how you approach your editing when you sit down than your gear even. There's always loads to learn there.
As to large long-form projects, yea, that's still on the edge for PrPro. I've talked with people who've cut a major project on PrPro and found that after they learned it, the whole thing went great. And of course, one sees here the posts from those who've tried but had many headaches. You don't want your software creating headaches in a Big Show project ... yea, you just don't. So anyone's got to work with what gets things done for them.
Kevin Monahan, Product Support manager for the Adobe DVA's, is an old FCP instructor himself. He's written some lengthy posts on best-practices for working long-form massive projects with multiple editors & colorists with PrPro. Having read through them, I'd say some of the things you need to do make "obvious" sense, and others ... don't seem so obvious. So one would expect many users to get in a pickle just because dang it, how are you supposed to know that? Not always obvious.
I've had people say "There's no way to do X in PrPro ... " ... and by the time I've figured out what their "no way" task really was, even with my limited editing skills/knowledge I could quickly point out the keyboard short to do it in PrPro. But they'd not been able to find that out ... the documentation for this is sort of maybe kind of useful. Most of the time. IF you know how to get through the first couple layers of FeatureTalk and actually get to how to use a blame tool.
That is definitely an issue.
And then there's the things that are easy in another NLE, and may not exist directly in PrPro. Which of course goes the other way too. All of which complicate the multi-editor workspace. That doesn't need further complications.
I was a TA at Adobe MAX for Dave Helmle, in charge of working with the movie/tv industry on PrPro issues. Had a good chat with him about this. Yea, IF one knows how, it can run well in multi-editor projects, but ... with a very different pattern to the process than people expect coming in. Once he's got a whole project staff trained, it works well.
To me ... that's an issue right there. If the clients need a trainer to run a major project, how many shops/production companies are going to jump to PrPro?
But it's their business, not mine. I just "play" here ...
Neil
(and yea ... there's some major stuuupid bugs ... sheesh ... )
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