Slideshow Software - Some Advice to the Developers

Never created a digital slideshow before, so consider me a newbie, assume I'm an idiot. But some real basic things created major annoyance for Charlise and I as we tried to turn the 615 pictures we took at a neighbor's birthday party for their young kids into a slide show set to music. I won't spare the guilty and will name names, but I'll stick to specifics even though I do have a few general complaints:

1. Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder - Hey, how about a description of the difference between the trial version and the paid for version? Nothing like spending several hours learning the tool and putting together the slide show, then finally burning it to the DVD only to find out that "Evaluation copy" is stamped across the front of every slide. Don't mind you doing that, since I can understand you wanting people to pay for your software, but it would've been nice if I'd known this before burning the DVD. It didn't show up in the preview. That said, we still might've been willing to buy the software, but not being able to set the slide duration below one second killed the deal. Sorry, but has it ever occurred to you that someone might want to set duration's less than a second? Is it really that hard to let them set it to whatever they want? There are others that do, and don't cost any more money.

2. Nero - You win, we ended up buying the software after using the trial version to make sure it had all the features we need. However, I'd expect it to be very easy to update from trial version to full since I've now actually laid down money for your product. That was not the case. We got the serial number just fine, but figuring out how to actually use it to turn the trial version into the full version took us at least two hours (no, I'm not exaggerating - if anything I'm understating it). That's crazy. How hard is it to put step by step instructions in the e-mail that say click here, here, and here, then enter the serial number and click here? That would've been nice, and would've made me feel a lot better about the money I just spent. We also found that it would only sort our 600+ photos by file name, not by date created which if you're not going to be flexible would at least seem a lot more logical to me. We had to trick it by changing file names and creating multiple groups. This took a lot more time that it should have as we tried various techniques to get around this issue.

That's it for the specifics. Since I'm not being specific now, I won't name names. We tried several other products that were lacking in capability one way or another, and none of the products were intuitive. Plenty of hours were wasted trying to figure out how to use each product, only to find in the end that it couldn't do what we wanted. This seems like it should be very simple to do, yet judging from our experiences it's apparently extremely difficult. Somebody please build a clean, simple, easy-to-use program to do this. All I want is:

1. The ability to view my pictures and easily drag and drop them into a timeline.
2. The ability to sort the pictures various ways (e.g. date/time created) without having to mess with the actual file names.
3. The ability to add music and view music and pictures along the same timeline.
4. The ability to edit the music in place (two main capabilities required - cut and insert - others are mostly extraneous but might be nice if they don't detract from ease of use)
5. To be able to set slide duration to any amount down to 0.00 seconds and up to any amount. There may be a limit, but it shouldn't be real hard to make it pretty high, like 9999.99 seconds. Yeah, I'm never gonna set a slide duration that high, but it can't be too hard to make it high enough to meet 99.99% of user's needs.
6. To be able to set duration for all slides in one easy to find place.
7. To delete all transitions in one easy to find place.
8. To be able to burn the result to a DVD easily in place via wizard or similar.

That pretty much covers it. My money and I are waiting