FYI, the native Mac version was 5 years too late.
Started using VSE on OS/2 in the 90s, and was disappointed when that platform was dropped. I eventually moved to Windows 2000 in the year 2000 and enjoyed having VSE once again. That lasted a few years, but then XP annoyed me enough tht I went and bought the new PowerMac G5 in 2003. For several years the best I could do was use RDP to a Windows 2000 box if I wanted to use VSE (it took over a year for VirtualPC 7 to come out with support for G5) or try to use any of the other junk (BBEDit, TextWrangler, etc are trash). There was a market of UNIX geeks just waiting for something useable, and that market was ignored while extreme niche's (HPUX, Irix, etc) were supported.
When the first Mac version came out, I installed it, tried it for maybe an hour at most, then deleted it. That repeated for each new version, except the testing time decreased with each iteration as I could confirm the same fundamental problems. Most of the criticism I had is already mentioned (horrid font rendering, sporadic unresponsiveness, copy/paste doesn't work right, key bindings are insane, etc). but there was another bigger showstopper. Any time I tried to Cmd-Tab my way to SlickEdit, I just get the launch wrapper which is also what shows in the dock. If I actually want SlickEdit, I had to use the mouse and click the X11 icon in the dock. Ugh. That was the most unacceptable aspect. That was an especially painful thing to me personally, for that violated the entire reason I owned a Mac. When I tried WinXP years earlier, it was not hard to revert the look to feel like Win2000, but there was a big problem; XP broke the alt-tab order, it was no longer an MRU list. That drove me so far up the wall that a week later I dropped $3k on the G5 without any reason other than cmd-tab worked as MRU when I tested it in the store.
At some point TextMate came around, and while it was never as great as VSE had been on OS/2 and Windows, it did have it's own great features (some of which SlickEdit still lacks). I used my Mac for about 8 years in all. After Apple dropped all PPC support I kept using my G5. It was when 10.7 came around and I saw the future of Mac, even if I bought an Intel box, was to be a iPad on your desk, I called it quits and moved on to Linux (just in time to discover KDE4 < KDE3 and then watch the Gnome3 insanity unleash). Someone mentioned to me there was a native version. Oh well, guess I'll never see it. I doubt it was a PPC binary when it finally came out in 2011. There was an opportunity, but you guys missed it. I waited the better part of a decade and never got anything worth using. I used to tell people how great VSE is, now I tell them how great it was. The Mac debacle cause me to loose almost all hope.
Today I am split between Win7 (with broken focus as well as bad alt-tab) and Linux (with broken X) and I use SlickEdit a bit, but it feels alien now. I spent long enough on TextMate that I have to re-learn basic things in SlickEdit. As I do, I see how little has changed. Going from V2->V3->V4->V5->V6 was big change. Going to V16, I see no difference from V6 in features. It's bigger, the licensing system is less awful, the UI style changed a bit, but it's essentially the same feature set with the same problems. The 2GB file limit really still there in 64bit build? Sorry, but many other editors solved that one a decade ago in 32bit builds. That is an absurd limit today. I came to the forums today looking for a solution to a basic file encoding issue and find a post over a year old with essentially the same issue and no response. I gave the OP an answer (which I'd figured out on my own despite the incorrect help file) and then started poking around. I couldn't help but stumble on this thread and notice that after some real constructive criticism in 2007, there's no followup whatsoever until 2011 when there's finally a native version. Somehow I suspect this the guys that started this thread totally gave up on VSE on Mac before then. I know I sure did. Seeing the current state on the platforms that have been longer supported, I'm not that far from giving up on VSE entirely. It's gotten too much like enterprise software. It's big, it's expensive, there's a new version every year with a new major release number and an upgrade fee, but no new features that matter and the oldest limits/bugs we've lived with are still with us.
It was a good long run, but VSE's time ran out somewhere around the time the versions changed to year numbers and the name changed to just SlickEdit. When OS/2 support was dropped I questioned the future as that was the birth platform, but the Win32 port was good. I can't say the same for the X11 versions, none of then were particularly good, and on Mac it was particularly bad. It's now becoming clear that the problem is general stagnation of development of SlickEdit, not limited to just the Mac port.
So long and thanks for the good years.
RIP VSE 1993-2003