I can feel your pain, I fear what i don't understand and SB kind of makes you have some blind faith.

Where SB is nice is if you add an interface, it builds it for you, when you have 16 zones of audio, it saves a ton of time.

We've spent 3 days programming an iPad app for a big distributed system using RTI,

if it were crestron, I could have dragged my interface into the project and been done.

I just finished Essentials for the second time, it made so much more sense to me after my minimal crestron sales the second time just because I've been playing with it a bit. The first time I took it I was in way over my head, I just wish I had the time to play with it more, but between a good work flow, sitting for 2+ hours a day in traffic, my wife and daughter, not a ton of time to become a programmer. You really need to dedicate yourself to becomming a programmer to be one with Crestron, I'll probably always be just a guy that can tweak an existing project and when I don't sub out my stuff to a caip, it will be SB. I'd almost rather just have them do it though, if you break a SB project it can take hours to fix.