Thanks for your response, Mike.
You're right! I've been hosting/producing a podcast at www.electricpolitics.com for about five and a half years. When I started I tried various audio software offerings and found STP the closest fit to my needs, which are fairly simple. I record on two tracks at 96/24 via firewire, edit and eventually reduce to mono (with an intermediate step using iZotope RX to reduce noise on one channel, the guest's, as my 'studio' channel is already clear), then assemble a project with intro and exit jingles, intro and exit comments, etc. Export to .aif for my archives, export to .mp3 for the podcast, and that's it. STP does that all fairly well and fairly reliably, with only an occasional hiccup.
Previously I'd tried Bias Peak and Digital Performer, but didn't much care for them. Like the Adobe product I found them unnecessarily complex for what I do, and confusing to use (or attempt to use). I never needed a course with STP, or had much reason to use the manual, though probably all the little tricks I've picked up over the years would have been better to learn quickly at the beginning.
So, either I'll just keep on keeping on with STP (VER. 3.0.1) or try to switch to something that could make better use of a multi-core machine. Faster is better though, realistically, at this point I wonder how much time I save with operations on the file sizes I typically work with. (And I might replace my early 2008 2.8 octocore with a new Mac Pro when the new models arrive, another consideration...)