Kdenlive is awesome. I am only a hobbyist but I cancelled my subscription to Premiere when I found it.
Does Kdenlive still lack GPU playback and rendering? It did when I last used it, and that'll be a non-starter for most professionals
Resolve Studio vastly outshines Premiere IMO. For $300 flat it’s a no-brainer.
I'm not a pro or anything, and I don't edit video super often, but I would like to point out that Lightworks is quite good, and offers a perpetual license [1] for $420 that is very often on sale.
I don't have the ability to compare these things in intimate detail, but Lightworks has at least been used for "real" productions [2] so I think it's production-ready.
Resolve Studio is more feature rich by a significant margin and 2/3rd’s of the price. Lightworks is a respectable program but I can’t really see picking it over resolve studio tbh. Definitely not for professional work.
I still root for them though. More NLE’s is good for the editing world as a whole and who knows, BMD could heel turn on us and ruin resolve. I’ve gone through 3 different NLE’s since 2011 (FCPX->briefly Premiere->Resolve) so I definitely don’t plan for more than 3-5 years ahead lol
I got the perpetual license for Lightworks Pro on a sale a couple years ago for $150, so it can be a bit cheaper.
I haven’t done anything with Resolve so I don’t have much to compare to.
Premiere is in a bad position anyway here, because in contrast to Photoshop, it is not really the industry standard, at least in the higher end stuff. That would probably be Media Composer.
Davinci Resolve is probably competitive with Premiere, but while free it's not actually open source. But either a viable competitor catching up or Davinci publishing the code could change that fast