How kind of you to put a soapbox down and invite comments.
Full Disclosure: I am an audio editing FREAK! If you go down into some artsy-fartsy part of a city and find the area where people sell antique furniture, you might find two craftsmen with shops where they will prepare your newly purchased furniture item or picture fram for you house. One craftsman gives your antique a quick, light sand-blasting and spray paint it with some funky current day tint of paint. The other shop owner has a wall full of fine tools. He will start by completely disassembling your piece of furnture, disolving all the glue that held it together, give it a fine sanding, and then reassemble your little jewel using varnish that lets the fine wood show through, but maybe give a nod to the contemporary times with interesting shades or color.
Both shops offer a legitimate service. By personality and skill-sets, when it comes to audio, I have a can of glue solvent and a wall full of well chosen hand tools. I disassemble a sound clip and then reassemble it. I don't use a lot of automation.
O.K. Now you understand my biases. I downloaded a trial copy of CS5.5 and part of it thrills me and part of it leaves me gasping for air. I think they have improved the quality of some of the processes like noise reduction. They have some added features (purchased plug-ins?) like the "tube style compression" that probably make it worth the price of an upgrade.
But the new interface leaves me gasping for air!!!! (So does the current versions of Microsoft Office. My wrinkled, ageing brain just cannot gracefully make the conversion from classic menus to what I think they are calling "The Ribbon" screen display. If you are younger, grew up on video games, the Ribbon may tickle your pallet very well.
Here is where we are as I see it: The market for pure-play serious audio software is a small, small market. Here is my evidence: Go to Barnes and Noble and check out the books. How many books are available, on the shelves, ready to carry out the door, after you thumb through them to see if the author speaks in a way you understand. HUNDREDS!!! Books on still photo editing? HUNDREDS!!! And how many books will you find on how to seriously edit audio? How many books do you find on AUDITION? The audio market is flea-sized in comparison.
The business managers at Adobe are not stupid. They are making a program out of Audition that a video editing person can love. And many of the video people are like my furniture shop that does a light sandblasting and sprays a quick coat of color that hides the blemishes and scars in the wood. They will love the increased automation that CS5.5 offers.
By the way, my Audition 2.0 will swallow up a video and let met do marvelous (but highly MANUAL) adjustment to the video audio. So that part of CS5.5 is not radically new.
Come back and ask me in six months if I decided to buy the CS5.5 upgrade.... and have I learned how to the damn thing to let me do the hand crafting of audio that is my style. I suspect the answer will be: Yup. I bought it. And after six months I am confident that some day I will become comfortable with getting the program to do what *** I *** want it to do... not what some video nut thinks is cool. ;D
FULL DISCLOSURE: In recent months I decided to learn to edit video. Who knows. In six months I may have switched sides and joined the enemy camp.
BOTTOM LINE: As of today I don't like CS5.5 but I am willing to try to understand the beast and hopefully become fond of it.