I'm with you on the Blender VSE vs Kdenlive question fwiw. First tried Kdenlive years ago and couldn't get sound to sync, so gave up. Tried again a few months ago, can't remember what the exact problem was but found it to be wanting compared to Blender.

I will admit that Blender has an unusual UI that will deter a lot of people.

was a few months ago when you tried kdenlive before or after their recent major overhaul? Basically, did you use the older version that was the traditional sequential-numbers versioning or the newer date-based versioning? (note that lots of progress has happened in even just the last few months)

Dunno to be honest. I've become a bit cynical because for the last decade or so people have claimed that there are good FOSS editors, then when you try and use them they fall apart at the first opportunity. Blender's the only NLE I've found that's not comically flaky. It's possible Kdenlive really has improved though.

Same here, for quite a long time there were a number of projects claiming to do video editing. (Anyone remember Jahshaka?) Blender was literally the only thing out there that delivered for years. This is one of the first projects I've seen that looked like it also delivered.

Like I said before it's good to see some actual competition in this space.

I used kdenlive 2 months ago. Worked very nice and was very useable (for someone without much video knowhow). There were some occasional crashes but thanks to autosaving this was not a big issue - but of course crashes should be fixed)

How many NLE software packages have you used?

I find it interesting that it seems that for a some people, Blender is their first experience with a node-based editor. They've been around for years. While I haven't used Nuke (or Shake), I was very good with Houdini for CG which is all based around nodes. It does include some basic compositing (or at least it did the last time I used it).

I tried maybe a dozen FOSS NLEs before finding Blender. Many, many years ago I used Premier.

The other big node-based thing is audio synthesis / effects, for example Pure Data. As far as I know these are the only areas where dataflow programming has really taken off.

LabView is node-based. It's extremely popular (and quite old).

http://www.ni.com/labview/

Matlab's Simulink is also node-based (probably because of LabView). It's also widely used.

http://www.mathworks.com/products/simulink/

Yeah, well, I'm not going to feed the cynicism by claiming that the FLO editors are on par with proprietary ones. I will say that Kdenlive is orders of magnitude more powerful and usable than whatever there was several years ago, and Openshot 2 looks to be a massive improvement (complete rewrite) over Openshot 1

Are you aware that kdenlive has been totally redone for qt5 / KDE5 and has had lots of continued work lately?

Overall Blender, Kdenlive, Natron, and perhaps the new Openshot 2 are the current best FLO options for video with some stuff like Pitivi something to keep a watch on.