Well, most of my movies are short ones.. but from the description of this, I'll stick with iMovie 6. No timeline really is bad, even for creating short clips.. not having control enough to have varying length for transitions is bad as well. iMovie 6 was non-destructive as well, but did have the disadvantage of not being able to share clips with other projects without copying them. That said, so, how many times do you really do that?? For me, it's quite rare. The idea of seeing it before rendering would be nice, but I imagine on slower machines, this is painful. Having all that footage (even if I took the time to clip the "bad" parts, is still a lot..) I typically work on a project, and then when I am done, I create a DVD image of it, and then backup that. My physical tape is the original should I ever need it again. To me, it does sound dumbed-down to a lower denominator. iMovie 6 did much of what you praise iMovie 8 for. And for you to sayt that you could use FCE and not iMovie... sounds like this whole review is flawed. Just my two cents.
I created a sample blog and managed to add haloscan comments to it. I have also been looking at the templates... they are XML based, so I think it should be possible to get iWeb to generate the code the comments, once I figure out the XML schema...
http://www.4haks.net/4haks/Blog/22E10B71-321F-4C87-9D17-F1C89393A2F7.html
I've Given Up Arguing with Windows Users
iLife '08—Part 2: iMovie—Flawed Genius
Why I Wish I Could Use Safari (and Other Task-Focused Mac Apps)
iWeb: A First Look
iWeb: A First Look