I think that debating features against marketshare tends to be a conversation where people simply talk past each other.
If you want to be a freelance editor, you'd better know Avid and FCP...no question about that. Corporate production installations for high end have definitely settled in on Avid initially, and now FCP is pushing into Avid's marketshare considerably. Unfortunately Avid became the dominant player, went to sleep, and woke up to see 10,000.00 USD NLE systems eating its lunch while its creative feature set hadn't really kept pace. Avid has been making some pretty massive pricing compromises to try to catch up. Whether they can stop the bleeding or not has yet to be seen.
Premiere Pro has a reputation with the FCP/Avid crowd that is only somewhat earned. Adobe lost a lot of ground through the tape-to-NLE-back-to-tape era when Avid's and FCP's deck control conventions were superior to Premiere/Premiere Pro's and without adequate fine VTR control, PPro was a non-starter in many of these workflows. Period.
As far as huge asset projects, Avid still has the mantle for media management. Final Cut is making inroads with capabilities for the price of course...Adobe has some work to do to orient the application to really establish some clout in this area. Also, the nature of Dynamic Link always running multiple executables in the background has left PPro starved for system resources on 32 bit systems...I had been advocating adding the ability to shut off DL when you start an editing session to allow PPro better access to system resources for simple cutting...it never happened....however...
Now, as Adobe has announced, they're moving to 64 bit only with CS5 versions of PPro and AE, which will open up RAM capacity and allow the system to take advantage of it. (64 bit Macs have been the rule for a while now, and even though FCP is 32 bit native, the ability of all applications to at least grab the maximum amount of RAM is huge when multiple apps are running like FCP, DVDSP, Motion, Color, etc.).
Support for native codecs is a semantic, and somewhat slight-of-hand discussion...PPro supports camera data in it's native form...direct to the timeline, and FCP uses log and transfer to rewrap any non QT media, or media that has significant metadata included. Is this a sin? No... is it "native?" Yes in the sense that the codec and essence file are intact...no in the sense that a "conversion step" is technically still necessary, creating a duplicate file that the camera wouldn't recognize, even though it's not a hard transcode like going to DNxHD would be...
FCP has ProRes, which is now an acquisition format in several devices and cameras, so that is undisputed native support...
Not sure why the impression is that PPro can't handle DPX...BlueFish boards were handling DPX inside of PPro several versions ago... Perhaps there is some nuance that Ben refers to? Log curves? Certainly PPro handles sequenced stills without any fuss at all...I was editing Targa files back in Premiere 6.5.
As far as RED support is concerned, CineForm had a RED RAW to CineForm RAW conversion process that outperformed the FCP transcode (originally not maintaining RAW through the process) by a factor of 100:1 several NABs ago...and RED blocked them from continuing, restraining everyone to the RED SDK, which wasn't very speedy at the time... FCP's support for RED files was early, but anyone who says the workflow was effective (the conversion times defied description) just wasn't being realistic. So early adoption is great, but workable workflows in anything but Scratch weren't all that varied in their arrival dates...
I've somehow survived 20+ years without using Avid or FCP as my primary platform...and I've got some professional credentials and awards...BUT I only hire out as an editor to clients who know the work I do and don't have standardization issues (i.e. an office with 40 FCP or Avid systems back home). Ben's point is completely legitimate on market realities in this respect.
However, I handle 2K RAW on the timeline (for 4 years now), and 4K RAW on the timeline (for a couple years) via CineForm...and 4:4:4 support that outperforms HDcamSR has also been available on PPro for some time via CineForm...so again, the capabilities slide back and forth depending on where you decide to focus. The competency of the RED workflow in Premiere Pro seemed to surprise many of the attendees of the StudentFilmmakers RED workflow seminar we did in New York in December...
The integration of the Adobe Suite is something I use extensively and I do get frustrated with the hoops FCP guys have to go through to deal with images and graphics on the timeline if I'm directing a project that is posting on FCP...and Avid is significantly clumsier than that. To Ben's point about episodic TV and feature films...rarely is the ability to load the layers of a Photoshop file natively an issue in these projects, they need to cut footage and sound...so the capabilities of Adobe's Suite don't necessarily gain them much traction. For Avatar, the overall post was Avid (I think...I can't recall) but the VFX guys were doing all their rough cuts, etc on PPro...where the integration with the suite for Photoshop and AE was an advantage.
The Mercury Playback Engine will cause a lot of users to give PPro a second look as rendering varied files on the timeline is still a reality in FCP no matter what sort of machine you're running it on. The feedback and response of this new feature (on a system with a high end display card) makes PPro act more like a Smoke than any other software-based NLE...however, will it grab more drama/feature work because of this capability? Definitely a question.
Color...that is definitely an area where Adobe needs to have an answer. Possibly most frustrating is that they have the technology in-house with Photoshop and AE and the color correction technology that exists in pieces throughout PPro. Somewhere in there they could construct something credible... I'm an Iridas SpeedGrade user myself, but there is no question that for color correction included in an NLE, Color is the most advanced option right now.
Shake...I get mixed signals on Shake. AE continues to advance (some users like what they're doing, some don't...the same as everything else), and Shake hasn't made much noise since about a year or two after it was acquired.
Cinema Tools are a nice feature that Adobe doesn't have an answer for...
Audio-wise, Adobe's Soundbooth was developed at a time when they decided to try to create a "Motion" for sound...by that I mean a simplified application that video editors wouldn't be intimidated by...I think Soundtrack probably has some advantage against it, but Premiere Pro has audio capabilities on the timeline that include sample-based temporal unit capability on the audio tracks in the video edit timeline (still the only NLE to have it...the audio portion of PPro being developed by two very nice guys who came from DigiDesign...), which trumps any other NLE and the audio feature set inside of PPro makes leaving PPro for many simple audio manipulations unnecessary. Adobe Audition is a DAW which is available separately from the suite (but still has a roundtrip capability with PPro), and we migrated from ProTools to Audition a handful of years ago and haven't been sorry.
Motion...lots of quick presets for quick titles and very tactile effect creation...video editors don't feel as if they have to immerse themselves in another discipline to make it work...mission accomplishedl. I do enough VFX work in AE that it doesn't intimidate me and I see limitations in repeatability for a non-math based compositing/MoGFX tool, so for me, Motion wouldn't be all that compelling...
Competition is a good thing, and at this time, the fact remains that any freelance editor needs to know Avid and FCP.
However, I think that Adobe is worth watching for those of you who may have written them off. The feature set debate tends to be workflow specific and isn't as one-sided as the current market share figures may imply....the very near future looks quite interesting.
Arguments about which is 'better' are unwinnable as both sides are convinced they are right. I think the fact remains that your workflow and your market dynamics are the key factors in any decision of this type. However, the assertion that any NLE "can't" do a certain type of work is usually too general to be meaningful.