Flash catalyst didn't meet my expectations

Question

I am no Flash expert nor a Catalyst pro by any means, so this is just my take on an average guy who tried and was less than happy with my results.
I was really hopeful of having a hybrid program that would bridge the gap between the complexities of Flash and my alternatives which have been SwishMax and a few other fill ins.
I found the import PSD function to work well and my start up went fairly well.
I managed my pages just fine and got the structure of my roughly 10 page interactive going ok.
Where i ran into headaches was the transition from page to page.
As i worked within the timeline and transitions windows, I found a lot of inconsistancies.
In several cases items that were on the page did not show in the transitions window
and i had  multiple problems getting items to enter and exit the way i had envisioned.
i would have also wished for more various transition options.
Conceptually i love the idea, but functionally my expectations were not met.
Granted, my trial was on version 1.0..  maybe things are better now.  
But I still love the folks at Adobe and all the products they continue to produce.

Answer 1

A lot of the bugs you describe sound similar to what I faced...
For one thing, how you actually move content etc and work the layers can create some unexpected results.  Also you can 'break' past navigations if the navigation is complex enough.
I find that by using transparent button (0:% opacity) with all the needed interactions, and also having nicely layered file at the outset, help a lot.
Learning to (partially) manage the state issue by building custom components correctly is also helping me a lot .
My biggest gripe with the transitions or moving layers etc, is that bulk transitions can't be done at once, and also the layers/library planels do not let you move more than one line-item at a time (say, grabbing a few layres and moving them at once.).I think Catalyst is sort of 'deceptively simple'.
Not sure if that encourages you... or makes it worse!