I'm enjoying my upgrade to VEGAS 17 quite a bit so far. I'm sure you all have no shortage of things you need to work on the next release--however, since VEGAS's big selling point is that it's a uniquely easy-to-use video editor, I thought I'd pipe in with a few suggested improvements for ways to make VEGAS even easier for new users to pick up and get running with!

• Support drag-panning around the main timeline. Since so much editing is performed on the main timeline in VEGAS, any change that makes navigating the timeline easier and more precise would be hugely helpful. To that end, I suggest allowing the user to drag-pan around the main timeline. (I'm not counting the currently panning behavior that comes from clicking the mouse wheel, as I find that to be terribly erratic--I end up overshooting the mark with that more often than not!) My suggestion for how to implement drag-panning: while the user holds the Alt key (or Control key), the cursor changes to a hand which the user can then click-and-drag to pan around the timeline in a 1-to-1 fashion.
• Update the Plug-in Chooser windows. The plug-in chooser windows are lacking the nice updates present in the Video FX pane. Giving them their own "Search plug-ins" field and visual effect previews would make effect selection far easier for users employing a clip-focused workflow.
• I want the program to automatically remember my layout changes unless I explicitly reset them. Every time I go to Manage Media or some other layout in the Dashboard and then I click to return to the Power User layout, all of my layout changes are erased. (Most annoyingly, I have to re-add all the buttons I want visible in the Video Preview pane.) This is, frankly, a productivity killer that makes the Dashboard much more trouble than it's worth.
• When the user goes to animate in the Event FX window, please have Sync Cursor on by default. Without Sync Cursor on, it's very difficult to tell how keyframes within the animation timeline correspond to the main timeline. "So why not press the Sync Cursor button yourself then?" you may ask. Simple: I didn't even notice this feature existed until today, and I've been using Vegas in one form or another since ~2012! By and large, new users are not going to notice this button tucked unassumingly into the corner. What's more, I can only think of a couple of rare edge cases where I wouldn't want Sync Cursor turned on. Seriously, just have it on by default (but remember it if the user turns it off).
• I really, really like that you can view and reposition keyframes on the main timeline with whole-track effects in VEGAS 17! This makes it dramatically easier to time effects so they coincide with other effects and with particular moments in the video. I find myself wanting this sort of keyframe visualization on the main timeline for clip-specific effects as well, since the majority of the effects I use are, y'know, clip-specific. This would present a UI design challenge, I realize, but hopefully not an insurmountable one; these clip-specific keyframes could perhaps sit on their own named sub-track layers with visibility that you can individually toggle on or off.
• Auto-resize event windows to fit their internal Animate timelines when you turn on Animate for any of their properties. It's not a huge deal having to manually resize the window once or twice, but having to manually resize the windows to see their timelines is the sort of minor annoyance that adds up to a cumulative productivity suck when multiplied across every effect a user animates.
• Put a Picture-in-Picture button on still image clips. It's counterintuitive that PIP isn't immediately accessible from still image clips with a single click the way Pan/Crop is, given that PIP is a much more useful tool for working with still images than Pan/Crop. Thus, I suggest you replace the Pan/Crop button with a PIP button on still image clips. You may also want to consider renaming PIP to something a little more intuitive, as nothing about that name suggests the sort of position/rotation/scaling transform functionality it actually provides.

These are the most significant areas for UI improvement that come to mind after using VEGAS 17 for a couple of days. Thanks for reading; I look forward to future versions of this software!