Sorry about the pricing; misunderstood your meaning. I thought you wanted to get away from Premiere quality-wise, not price-wise.

I actually found Vegas to be FAR more intuitive than Premiere. I'll admit that the screenshots look confusing, but unless we can find a screenshot of Fisher Price's "My First DVD Authoring Environment" I don't see audio/video mastering software getting a whole lot more simple.

I do have to disagree about the concepts of "far better", "more powerful" and "easier to use", though. Each is completely open to interpretation, and they have nothing to do with price or complexity. A software package is a tool, nothing more nothing less. The tool needs to fit the job. For someone creating a DVD of the home movies from little Timmy's birthday, the program you're linking to is probably fine. For high-end professional work, it takes something a little further up the scale. Take Adobe After Effects; great for motion graphics and compositing at the Art Institute, but if you're going to do film work, you use something like Smoke, Flame or Inferno.

Paint Shop Pro is NOT a Photoshop replacement. It's a program that's perfect for someone who needs something like Photoshop, but doesn't quite need Photoshop. And no matter how much people WANT to believe it, the Gimp isn't a replacement for Photoshop either. It's a program that's great for someone who runs Unix and needs something like Photoshop (or a version of Photoshop newer than 3.0).

Sorry if I'm coming off bitchy here, this is just something I run into pretty often in the work-life. People tend worry about price first, then wonder why they aren't getting the exact results they want.....Of course, that's work life. Not real life..