Hi Stephen, I too have found MediaShout 6 a real pain. We upgraded from the last release of MediaShout 5.
Version 6 killed off several things that we regularly used, and provided no meaningful alternatives.
For example, our song-leaders sometimes go with either of two possible following pages in a cue - the following page, or some other (e.g. continuing on to the bridge, or going back to the verse). In preparation for this, we would select (click on) the alternative - in the example, the verse. Then, if the singer started into the bridge, we would hit the space bar; if they jumped back to the verse, we would hit the Enter key. There is no equivalent in MediaShout 6 that I have found - you have to use the mouse to display the alternative (which is not necessarily in view).
Another feature I regularly used and loved was typing the cue number (or sub-number, or both) - e.g. "24" to jump to cue 24, or ".5" to jump to the fifth page of the current cue, or "22.3" to jump directly to the third page of cue 22. Now, queues don't even have numbers. Again, I haven't found any practical alternative.
In summary, I think the total elimination of keyboard shortcuts (apart from Space) is a desparately bad move.
The other thing I *hate* is the lack of retention of view context. Consider when I have two scripts open in separate tabs, with the current selected and displayed cue being multiple page heights of cues down the list on the current tab. I then switch to the other tab - perhaps to edit something that will be displayed later. Then, I switch back to the first tab - the view is now right at the top of the list. The selected item is still the same, but I have to scroll down the list to return to my previous viewing position. Personally, I can't see that as any form of improvement or "more intuitive".
I have also encountered terrible behaviour in the "in-place" cue editors. If I click into the text in a cue and then delete something, or press Enter to insert a line-break, sometimes (it seems to have some pattern, but I have not yet fully understood it), the insert point (the cursor) jumps to the top of the page. Therefore, clicking into the cue, pressing enter and then typing something sometimes puts the new text where you clicked, and sometimes at the top of the page!
Again, following some kind of pattern that I have still not been able to fathom, if I click into a text queue, perform some editing (most commonly, pasting some text) then highlight some text in the page and attempt to apply an alignment (such as "centred"), sometimes the alignment is applied to the first line of the page instead of the selected text. I have found that, by performing a few meaningless clicks and selects between the paste and the selection of the actual text I want to align, the alignment is reliably performed on the correct text. I don't find this particularly intuitive or "easier to use".
A similar issue to the issue described above with view context occurs when a page in a cue is deleted or pasted - the view jumps to the top of the list of pages, although the selection is still at the location of the change made. Further, when a page is deleted, the content of the cue editor often doesn't reload - the content of the deleted page is still displayed. Taken together with the view context issue, this can mislead you into thinking that you did not actually hit delete (as in, the "Delete" key on the keyboard), which has several times led to the operator hitting delete again, and so deleting a page that was not intended to be deleted.
While MediaShout 5 had some horror issues with its editor, that was the only regularly encountered problem with that version. Now, I just hate using MediaShout, unless I can simply compose a script by dragging in some existing cues - no editing required. If I need to create a new cue, for example, for a new song that we are about to start using, I shudder in anticipation of the frustration that lies ahead.
So Ryan, if you are interested in giving some advice on these issues, I would be happy to receive it.