Yeah, the QM 2 vid has completely different lighting - no back scatter off the clouds and water. That darkness saved the shot.
I agree with you on Premiere. The learning curve is a vertical wall. I use Vegas Studio and am pretty happy with it. I'm going to upgrade to Pro at some point as it supports some of the other things I want to do. I'm also going to take a look at Corel Video Studio which has gotten some good reviews. Not sure it has the plug-in and noise reduction packs that are available for some of the more premium products. I use Corel Photo Studio for stills and am really happy with it. Much more intuitive than Adobe.