I understand what you're saying, but it sounds like you're reading the claims on the milk carton and saying "See? It says it's fresh right on the carton! Why is it making me puke? This is the last sip I'm going to take..."

Product marketing teams can be everyone's worst enemy. The claim of unlimited tracks in Vegas dates back to the DV25-only phase, when vegas only had to really render a frame at a time. 32-bit? Obviously it's not ready for prime time yet. Stop sipping from that bottle.

Definitely take Bob up on his offer. We used to have a Russian camera repairman at the rental house I worked at, and he had a great turn of phrase - "Two heads better than one, three...same shit!" Working with Bob is probably going to be more productive than all the varied input you'll get on this forum.

I'm certainly not recommending that SCS limit the end user's imagination, except maybe in the sense of the spoiled milk analogy they could limit our imaginative idea that Vegas has no limits at all.

Normally I'd never recommend that someone be conservative but in the case of editing a long form project I think a conservative approach is a great idea. What would that entail? Maybe have one project that is just edits, others to do composites that you render before bringing into the edit, and then an audio finishing project with your hundred audio tracks that just uses a single vision track for the rendered video from the edit project.

If you wanted to logically troubleshoot the master project (not the 10 minute segments), you could make a test copy of the project and then remove 98 of the 100 tracks (or at least get it down to a minimum of tracks). Just start weeding through the tracks to see if you can render the most basic timelines. If you can't even render once you've simplified the problem then you've probably demonstrated that the whole project needs to be moved to another NLE, or maybe move the compositing to After Effects, etc, etc.

Rob