Agreed about the NLE. I tried using blender (iirc 2.9) to make a family vacation compilation and it was a lot of work and not very intuitive. I barely do any video editing though so I may just not have had a good workflow. I wasn't able to find very good workflows either, I'm assuming because blender was still awkward for this use case and others usually reach for another tool.

I'm very much looking forward to further improvements and judging from the breakneck pace of features and how much love the project gets, I'm very optimistic about the future!

I had some issues with audio syncing to variable FPS video. Which is mostly used to save some space and battery when taking videos on consumer cameras, but probably something that profesional movie makers do not use at all. Still it would be nice for home video makers if that thing just worked out of the box.

This problem is present in Premiere Pro too. The recommended solution is to convert the variable FPS video to constant FPS before using it as a source.

For a free, lightweight video editing with a UI similar to Premiere, I recommend Olive 1.0:

https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/

It's small, opens fast, and does a good job.