Interesting thread.
All good points.
Here some points from me as I am one of those 3rd party guys who fixed some of the lacks of the old versions with some custom tools.
All over the years FCP existed there had been problems, sometimes massive ones, sometimes frustrating one, sometimes missing ones (cause the world changes all time).
Version 4.1 changed the world because of the XML introduction. But it was a really buggy version and XML was very basic. But it opened the app (and interaction with it) to a lot of people/developers around the world.
I had been the first who published a public version of an XML based app.
Because of my work with BWAV files since FCP version 1 which used Batch Lists for metadata (anyone remembers?) or EDLs (what's that?)and ALEs to import files I was introduced to Helana Ju at Apple. She was head of development for XML all over the years and she was very responsive and a good friend for several of us. That helped the developer community to grow and helped FCP sales to grow as well.
A lot of third party stuff changed the way of communication between apps and collaborative workflows.
Preparing for X there was a more or less different development group who had to follow this new kind of paradigm of X, which was (and still is) a challenge. They are very busy and less responsive therefore.
Even though XML seems to affect only a hand full of users it's a good example to learn about FCPX's internal structure and as Simon mentioned it's damn complicated - far away from the way his Spitfire can be handled.
There is finally a lot of house keeping to be done by the Apple guys to bring the parts together into a working interchange format.
Take an example which was mentioned above by Ben Scott:
subtitling workflow from STL files and improvements
When XML import/export was supported by X it took me 3 days to publish basic solutions for that, they are free because they don't make sense in a professional way and they can't make sense until a massive change within the XML handling will happen (or there is an API for the project structure).
I know several developers who gave up for now to create workflow apps - I didn't, but it's a kinda frustration here.
Several of the developers complaint about missing Apple Events which formerly made their apps working seamless with FCP. This doesn't exist anymore and won't exist anymore, because it doesn't match with the Sandbox stuff Apple requires (that was posted by Greg who works with Philip on all the cool IA apps).
Another problem is that good old QT is dying and AV foundation is not really there , this makes it even more complicated.
So currently all you can do is to use X, if it works it's fine - if not write a bug report (not a feedback). For a bug report you need to be a developer - that's free. But writing a bug report is handled different from feedbacks, you get a ticket ID which can be tracked.
And even if people complain they have to pay 299 bucks for a beta - it's way cheaper than the mxf4mac/P2Flow bundle 3rd party stuff Jeremy used to use with FCP :)
Andreas
Spherico
http://www.spherico.com/filmtools
