Why is FCP so wimpy?

OK so maybe that is inflammatory. But this is driving me nuts.

I have been using FCP since v1. But I never really tried to do a long form. Because I also use M100.

M100 ever since the late 90's has been able to play titles real time with drop shadows, no rendering for recording to tape. And do CC full res no rendering.

I currently have 3 suites with M100 (latest Suite) and latest FCP (09 Suite). With AJA HDe and Matrox MX02.

The M100 will play realtime full res up to 4 layers of video tracks 1080 (I mean multi graphics tracks with drop shadows varying opacities and video tracks with varying opacities) with no rendering. Also lots of transitions play full res no rendering. This is on the same systems with 600MB/s RAIDS.

FCP needs to render even a cross dissolve to play full res. Also M100 CC is full res playback with no rendering.

Why is FCP so bad at this?

For the first time I am doing a 1 hr program in FCP, just to see how it would do. And I now really regret it. I am forever rendering. In M100 I would just work, and see everything play full res all the time.

Also the audio in FCP is really awkward, having to jump into STP all the time. M100 does it right in the timeline (compression, eq, reverb etc with presets you can make and just click on.

I really do like Color, but I can do XML round trip from M100 to Color just like in FCP.

Basically I believe M100 is about 3-5 times as fast to work in, at least the way I work.

I would appreciate any comments.

Olof Ekbergh