Why is Premiere so dum?

Question

Ok, maybe its me, and there is a magic, quick method to resolving this that I'm oblivious to (if so, I put this down to poor, unintuative software!!), anyway (for my sins - it seemed like a good idea at the time!!) all my video projects are on external USB drives. I also have external DVD drives etc. Also I recently added a blu-ray drive to my PC.
If I then try and open an existing Premiere project it asks me to locate all my project files!!! (because the drive letter has been changed or re-assigned)
What kills me is that you can't just point to a root folder and Premiere will then find all necessary files and sub folders (aren't computers suppost to be good at this sort of stuff?), no, you have to point the dum software to every single differnt file location (hey, I thought I was being organised and put all audio in an "audio" folder etc. etc.) With a BIG project this can be very tedious task. To cap it all when you've done all this timewasting hoop jumping Premiere will then re-conform and index ALL the files AGAIN!!!!!! (can take hours).
Wow, is this to inspire all those artistic thoughts that you may have had before you started??!!
Go on, tell me I'm stupid and there's a super simple way of dealing with this major pain . . . . ;-))
PS: Using CS3 (had CS4 and gave up!!)

Answer 1

Jeff,
Your example, post 23, is a good one, and should be worth noting. I inherited a Project that had been partially done on another platform. There were sub-folders with many of the same file names, but the files were different, often VERY different. I had to re-Link 1400+ still image files (plus 100+ AV files) by hand, and also verify that I was getting the exact file (remember that the file naming was the same, except for the exact location) for each one. PP was good at figuring out many of the files, when they were in the same sub-Folder (I still had to check each one via a "test" set of DVD's though). Had PP just gone for the file names, I would have been SOL. Once the Links were reestablished, the drive letter assigned in all machine OS's, these Links have held, though the external has been swapped about for about 6 mos.
Yes, it would be nice if PP could
i somehow
know which version of Image_001.JPG (out of more than a dozen in various sub-folders) was required for Sequence X, but heck, I didn't know until I studied the DVD, and used Bridge to look at all of the Image_001.JPG's. At least the JPG's were easy. There were over a hundred .MOV files in the Project, and the original external had up to 12 files with the same file names, but totally different files. In addition, all of the .MOV's had a fade from black, so Bridge displayed a black frame for all of them, and I had to play each one to see what the heck was in it, then re-Link to the correct one.
Much of the blame can be placed on the initial editor for really poor housekeeping and file naming. PP did its best, as did I. Still, if it had just gone to the disk and had chosen one version, based on file name, I would have had 10x the work to do.
I believe that this could be one of those "be careful what you ask for... " situations. A can of worms could well become a barrel of vipers!
Just like doing a flowchart,
b BEFORE
one starts an Encore Project, planning the layout for a Project,
b BEFORE
one Imports the first Asset, and taking into account all possibilities, like moving the Project to another machine, can really pay dividends later. File naming conventions, and folder layout are very, very important.
Hunt