Just to be clear, I would definitely have used file packages for the media, but as far as the general persistence, Core Data might have been the way to go, although it would be easier to embark on that now, compared to way back when we started using it. So I'm not against Core Data, it's just that it's been an extremely difficult battle due to the immaturit of the documentation (which has been improving over time), the lack of debugging tools, the propensity for it to crash rather than offer helpful error messages, and the fact that it's a bitch to whip into shape when you are a highly multi-threaded application.

If I were starting an appliction now, I'd definitely consider it -- but only if I could figure out a way to store resources in a package, as opposed to in the database as a blob. (The current challenge, which I hope Apple will fix, is that NSPersistentDocument won't really work with a package.)