Adobe's move to a more "Final Cut" Premiere Pro is not all good.

Question

Hi everyone. I don't post very often and I decided to do so because I want to hear people's comments on this subject. I have been a premiere pro user since Premiere Pro 2.0 and I've a good handle on Final Cut and Media Composer. To this day, I've always preferred Premiere for a number of reasons.
As of late, many Final Cut users have been migrating to other NLEs and in response to that the latest iteration of Premiere (Premiere CC) has included some decidedly FCP-ish features (And some Media Composer-ish stuff too). In my opinion, some are rather welcome additions and some are not.
What prompted me to write this is the feeling I got when I started using CC. It felt like in the rush to welcome the newcomers, some things were lost for those of us who has stuck by adobe for years.
Here's my list of good and bad:
Good stuff:
1) Auto Locate - Premiere is now smarter at finding your files. Awesome!
2) You can now select clips and move them up and down in tracks with keyboard shortcuts.  Great!
3) You can move target and source tracks with keyboard shortcuts! In fact there are many new things you can do with keyboard shortcuts! (Can you tell I like keyboard shortcuts?) I'll leave the keyboard alone now. Yay! Ok now I'll leave it alone.
4) Audio Clip mixer. Now, I really don't see when I would use this, but sure. Why not? It's not invasive and they kept my track mixer as awesome as ever. I'm sure final cut users could shed some light as to it's utility. Specifically, what can you do now, that you couldn't without the Clip Mixer?
5) There are a few cool ways to expand tracks. (I've heard it works a lot like Media Composer).
6) You can now customize the buttons on your audio tracks. Sweet! (Also feels a bit Media Composerlike)
Bad stuff:
1) Symmetrical transitions - This is meant as a feature for Final Cut users but it's actually horrible to me. I don't want my start point to mess with my end point. I want to put them both exactly where I need them and have them stay. I know you can hold shift to get the old behavior back but I find I'm holding shift a lot these days.
2) Transition icon changed to a suspiciously fcp looking transition. It's smaller. I don't see the advantage of changing the look. I certainly don't see the advantage of making it smaller. Not a big deal, but not a fan.
3) The "fx" box replaced the name of the parameter whose keyframes you are currently seeing inside the clip. Now you can't tell which parameter you are looking at. Is this an attempt at removing clutter? Cause I think allow for the user to customize clip info is a better approach than simply removing stuff.
4) The clips now turn white when selected. Again I remember complaints of clips not being obviously selected but now you lose the label color when you select a clip. This means that if you select a bunch of clips, you can't use the color to see if you picked up something that should've stayed unselected.
5) Audio display now shows half of the wave instead of the doubled mirrored wave it always showed before. This sucks. Every DAW I've ever used (Pro Tools, Digital Performer and Audition to name a few) shows the mirrored wave. It's kinda standard. This new view is actually harder to look at. The negative view of the wave (the part of the wave that isn't the sound) looks like the bottom part of a wave. It's very distracting and annoying.
6) Work area bar is gone. This isn't such a big deal since the functionality has been added to the in and out marks, but since the work area bar is also a part of After Effects, this makes Premiere work differently than it's family of apps. I would think that having overlapping or similar tasks performed similarly throughout the Creative Cloud Apps would make a lot of sense to Adobe.
Again, Adobe Premiere Pro has been and still is my NLE of choice. This isn't an angry rant. I simply felt it was an update that removed some great functionallity and wondered if others felt the same. I'm sure my list is both incomplete and of course simply an opinion. I'd love to hear people's reaction to the new Premiere Pro CC. Do try and be nice though.

Answer 1

Jim.
Agreed. You can't please everyone every time. Though user customization goes a long way I think. And I definitely feel like this release was not really targeting me.
shooternz - Too bad. I did know this. It's not such an imposition but it does change the way I work without gaining anything I wanted. Seems like a lot of people actually like the symmetrical transitions though. Me, I think it is only useful when you don't care about being very precise. Maybe not. Maybe there's a good use for it. I haven't found it. I just wish there was a way to make the default behavior what it used to be and the symmetrical transitions work with shift. I'm already getting used to holding shift all the time so I'm not worried. I just don't see much advantage.