Any big gotchas that you have come across or any tricks using it (special plugins, etc)?
You can version control your edits and do text operations since it's a MLT file so that helps.
Not really my thing but you can insert HTML5 overlays and animations. There's a demo on the youtube channel but it's quite "verbose" for most users.
GPU accelerated filters are really fast and I have no problems working with 1080p 15GB+ files. But that's nothing compared to what professionals use so I can't really comment on that.
I don't get this. Why is this true for the genre? I've been trying various video editors for 10 years, and they all crash. Every last one of them. I recently gave up on Windows Moviemaker because it crashes rendering anything over 30 minutes long. (Not only does it crash, it freezes Windows so bad you have to powercycle.)