Aiming at the professional market first is a smart move imo. It will ensure a backbone for further development. And I don't mind having to wait if it turns out to be too far out of my reach price-wise.
WHAT professional market could they possible address? First of all, you're picking off what's likely a tiny segment of the population, so you're setting an inherent upper limit to your customer base. And then, of course, professional markets are already well established, so even if you offer something revolutionary, many people won't consider moving.
For example, Avid and Adobe have both sold video editors (NLEs) in the professional market, for years. Both have become established standards, and both typically have offered trailing edge features (it was only recently, relatively speaking, that you could mix different video formats, or get reasonable audio support, in these apps). Sony, NewTek, and many others have offerings that are more powerful in many ways, but they are never going to get some people off "the standard". And this kind of thing is true in pretty much every professional market.
Next, you have infrastructure. Let's say I want to do video editing. So I need the video editor, something pro-class. I also need a high-level audio program or two, something like Cakewalk's Sonar or Sony's Acid... and an editor for audio, while you're at it, like Sound Forge.
Back to video... I need something for compositing and particle animation... Adobe AfterEffects or Boris FX or something like that. For some users, a high-end titling program, for others, 3D animation tools like Lightwave.
Of course, your video has to go somewhere, so you need a pro-class DVD and Blu-Ray authoring program. You have to prepare artwork for video, disc, and packaging, so you need something like PhotoShop for graphics editing.
And within the video and audio editors... I'm going to do stuff here, right? I need effects, transitions, equalizers and dynamics processors and noise reducers and noise makers... I probably have close to 100 plug-ins for audio and video processing on my system. If you do lots of music, you need to add in software synthesizers, etc.
That's just do the CORE of one professional job. If you're a one-man shop, you might also need web development tools, business tools, publishing tools, etc.
And if some of the pieces in this ecosystem are not up to par, don't expect to get any professionals interested. You not only need to attract them from what they're doing now with something better, you have to make that a smart move. Think about it... if you're already doing this job, you have thousands already invested in hardware and software... why do I move to something new and different, rather than, say, new, more powerful, but otherwise the same... like upgrading that Core2 CPU to an i7. That's a move that can be measured directly in increased productivity, and it doesn't add software expenses to the hardware expenses.
