I wouldn't say you have completely failed to get me in the
QLab world. But it's definitely an uphill fight. I'm very much a P.C. guy in the first place and it appears that SFX is the most widely used software (at least locally). So that's two strikes against
QLab. SFX is known to crash or have buggy versions that crash... that's a
strike against it. But I'm enough of a techno geek that I can
build and maintain a P.C. that is designed to make SFX very happy for a lot less than a
Mac.
Thanks for the tip on the new version of SFX. Our building won't be finished until the fall and we won't perform our first show there until January... so I'll make sure I wait for that new version if I do go with SFX.
Oh, I wouldn't want to fight to get you to use
QLab. I'm very much a "use the right tool for the job" kind of person. And in the case of education, if the local employers are using SFX it would probably be irresponsible not to give your students some SFX exposure.
For what it's worth, I will say that
QLab is making a fairly strong inroad into the professional community, and a number of universities are training students on it (I had a chance to visit Yale recently, and it looked like they'd more or less switched to using
QLab for everything in the graduate program). So over the next few years if I can continue to offer a strong product I expect you may see it popping up more often.
But again, that isn't to say you should jump into using
QLab now, since you have some good reasons why SFX would be a better fit for you and your students right now.
On the cost question,
Mac Mini's are used by a lot of designers as their main playback machine with
QLab, so you don't have to break the bank to make a Mac-based rig. (Sidenote: I don't recommend the Minis for video playback, but they're great for audio.) It will also run fine on relatively old hardware, so that's an option too.
Anyway, good luck with everything. I mainly just wanted to give you the heads-up on the new version of SFX coming down the pike. They've been working hard on it for a few years and early reaction from SFX users has been quite positive.