Apple gained so much professional mindshare in the early 2000s with FCP, Shake, Logic, Aperture, Motion, XSan, XServe, etc. I worked in a graphics/media studio at the time, and the excitement was palpable. And creating things with those apps was just fun.
It feels like a shame that only vestiges of that time remain today. The bar is much higher in some ways (lower in others), it takes a lot more skill and specialized knowledge to compete, and almost all vendors don't put in the same careful attention to detail (especially UX) that the Apple pro apps of that era had.
It seems there was a huge loss of software in the 32bit->64bit switch. Code bases in Cocoa were too heavy to switch to Swift (or whatever the specific languages were). FCPX is such a different version than FCP. Just like QTPlayerX is so different than QT Player 7 Pro was such a regression of capabilities. I doubt there was a "this is the best QT Player we've ever released" on that "upgrade".
It feels like a shame that only vestiges of that time remain today. The bar is much higher in some ways (lower in others), it takes a lot more skill and specialized knowledge to compete, and almost all vendors don't put in the same careful attention to detail (especially UX) that the Apple pro apps of that era had.