Facility Management Dilemma re: FCP-X

I currently have 7 seats of FCP 7: 4 for editors, 2 for assistants/interns and 1 in a mobile rig.

THE PROBLEM: I need to hire two more editors and one more assistant this year. Since it's not ready for prime-time I can neither put them on FCP-X systems nor can I make sound business decisions based on the premise that Apple, might, one day, upgrade (read: fix) FCP-X, raising it to professional standards. Additionally, I can't purchase new seats of FCP 7 as of last Tuesday. Lastly, I need a product that will allow us, and our hopefully new hires, to share media and projects with each other and our assistants so I need uniformity between all the edit suites and assistant stations.

So, as a facility owner, and editor, what do I do?

SOLUTION #1: Switch my existing 7 systems to Premiere Pro? Easy to do since we have CS5 on every Final Cut rig, plus it'll work with our AJA cards. No one here has spent a second of their time on it as it has no cache in our market but, people can be trained and can/will learn to adapt if necessary.

SOLUTION #2: If I'm able to overcome a decade and half's worth of ill-will towards Avid I can try to borrow, and in turn, spend, close to $24,000 on ten Media Composer systems (sans three new computers and related hardware). Given the costs involved, I'd really rather not.

And then there's this idea...

SOLUTION #3: Apple allows us to purchase additional licenses for the FCP 7 disks many of us already own.


Solution #3, selling FCP 7 licenses, would allow many of us to continue doing business as usual (and growing our businesses) while the product team developing FCP-X has the time they need to either hear our concerns and react, or not, but at least it gives us time to breathe, think and enact a plan. Also, Apple's gone dark with regards to communicating with their resellers, who, I have to imagine, would quite enjoy being able to sell us some additional seats of a now-dead, but still vital, editing platform.

I fear the worst-case is upon us, but...here's hoping Cupertino is listening *crosses fingers*