Is there anyone out there happy with Media Encoder?

Question

After almost year of working with CS4 under both XP 32 bit and now Windows 7 64 bit, I am delighted with Photoshop and After Effects, tolerant of the defects in Premiere, and absolutely insanely angry about Adobe Media Encoder.  I have spent a great deal of time following other people's posts and recommended "fixes."  None have made the slightest difference in the ponderous performance and frequent crashing, especially when exporting AC3 files through Surcode.
I have tested this setup with no greater happiness on clean installs with NOTHING else on the computer but CS4 with all updates.  These systems have all significantly exceeded Adobe's requirements for the software.
I have used in that time three different motherboards.  I have worked with Premiere for years, literally since version 3.  A have loads of experience optimizing computers for video.  I also have lots of experience with other editing systems, having done in-depth reviews of NLEs for DV Magazine for a number of years.  This is not to say that I have not missed something, but the consistent complaints I see reveal a critical lack of attention to the broken bits of this system.
I see lots of posts on this and other forums about the poor performance of AME.  I see very few where anyone is happy with the software.
My current 2-hour project which loads into Premiere in under a minute can take 20 or 30 minutes to load in AME.  Even when exporting only audio, AME appears to launch PPheadless and render all video frames before getting to the audio, and I have repeated issues with the program locking up when exporting more than 20-25 minutes of audio.
The decision to remove all direct exporting ability from Premiere and use the often broken Dynamic Link to AME was a gross mistake which in my opinion takes Premiere off the table for any professional shop.  I do not do work for hire, but I cannot imagine explaining to a client who is paying by the hour why we have to sit and wait for fifteen or twenty minutes for AME to load the project that was already loaded in PP to just export a brief section.  The architectural decision might be OK if all the bits that were involved were bulletproof and reliable, but the ImportProcessServer.exe and other dynamic link bits are clearly the source of problems for many people.
So here's my question: is there ANY professional end user out there that is happy with the current incarnation of AME and the decision to remove direct export ability from PP?

Answer 1

What format(s) do you work in?  What length of project?  Do you output to AC3?  I have no problems with AME for short projects or to output the same size/format -- for instance, I can usually output full HD for Blu-Ray but experience lots of crashes if scaling down to SD for DVD.  The crashes also occur above certain lengths, usually 20 min +.  With audio, I can output 5.1 uncompressed WAV in the same format (for instance, 16 bit) but if I try to output 24 bit (which AME is supposed to be able to do) I get "Encoding Failed - Unknown error."  In fact the error log is ALL that very helpful message, always when transcoding to another format/bit depth/size.  When outputting 5.1 to AC3, AME freezes up and fails at around 20 minutes.
Our systems are very silimar -- the current system is i7 proc with 6gb ddr3 ram on a gygabite GA-EX58-UD3R.
A have not had any huge issues really with AME for short videos or output to FLV for web.
But the workflow I use is something that CS4 is SUPPOSED to be able to do.  And the very unusual issue is that I have seen posts about the same type of errors (with ImportProcessServer etc) on Macs as well.