Easing with the CS4 motion editor - ridiculously hard

Question

Is it just me or is creating and applying custom easing with the motion editor absurdly difficult?
Firstly, the bezier curve tool for custom easing has a mind of its own. It will change the curve at a different anchor point to the one you're editing on a whim and every time you get close to where you want the curve it does it again and you're back to square one.
Second, you have to recreate a custom ease for EVERY TWEEN as there's no way to save them. It's impossible to create two custom eases exactly the same!
The entire motion editor seems designed to infuriate me and parts of it don't seem to have been tested AT ALL.

Answer 1

Hi Jen
Thanks for your replies. Your advice regarding manipulating the bezier curves certainly fixed that particular issue for me - I think the problem in making the switch from CS3 to CS4 in this regard is that CS3 FORCES you to click on an anchor point because clicking on the curve itself creates a NEW anchor point. In CS4 you can be manipulating all of the anchor points without even knowing it (as I did).
I haven't been successful in copying and pasting a custom easing curve to another tween. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. This was very useful in CS3 and in my opinion negated the need for custom easing presets.
My main problems with the motion editor are firstly how obtrusive it is, taking up at least a third of my screen real estate to be useful and secondly how counter intuitive it is - to me it seems that you have to do a lot of the work that CS3 did for you.
I think that if you have to explain how things work to people like me who've been using Flash for years, then something's wrong. I realise that CS4's motion editor is more powerful but I'd suggest this comes as a cost to productivity and an increase in sheer frustration. It's not just the time it takes to figure out how things work, but it also slows my computer down to a snail's pace sometimes. And, of the 10-15 rows of information there, I'm usually only using one row at a time. One suggestion I have here is to minimise each category (eg 'Transformation') by default, rather than having to click through the arrows of the categories you aren't using. After Effects certainly doesn't open up every property of every layer by default. It also gives you the ability to completely hide what you don't want and shortcut keys eg p to give you only the position properties.
Another major issue for me is that the visual relationship between the length of the ease and the length of the tween is kind of lost. It took me a while to realise that they are actually one and the same and I think this may be one of the major problems with the functionality: why do they need to correspond to each other? In After Effects there is no such relationship (correct me if I'm wrong) and in CS3 the visual representation of a custom ease (in a popup) had no relationship to the length of the tween itself either. I think it's too much to look at all at once and actually reminds me more of a music sequencer like Cubase, giving you the ability to change volume, panning, effects etc of a track. If all I want to do is ease from one x position to another why am I shown the tween on the timeline, the tween for the x property in the motion editor (along with all the other properties with numbers for each) and also the curve for the ease?
I also question the changes to the way tweens are created on the timeline - to me it seems counter intuitive and an interruption to workflow - but that's another issue altogether!
Thanks
John