Practicality of fade-in/out transforms in Blender My knowledge for doing fade-in/fade-out transforms in Blender's Video Sequence Editor is based on the answer to the following question:

https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/2104/6335

What is described is a multi-step process which struck me as rather cumbersome for a simple transformation such as a fade-out to black (add a color strip, add a cross-effect, etc).  Is this how power-users do this activity in Blender?  Or do they use a plug-in that I may not be aware of?  Or, is it just the case that Blender is really not used for such simple transforms and instead, some other tool (such as After Effects) is used?

Blender is plenty powerful in other tasks, and I am not knocking Blender's overall capabilities. Rather, I would like to know the usage in real-world workflows for this specific, rather rudimentary task.  (Even in Microsoft's brain-dead Movie Maker, what is involved is more straightforward.)

(I am reminded of the various attachments you can get for KitchenAid.  Yes, it is possible to juice with a KitchenAid, but why? It is not what is was built for in the first place.)
The vse is quite powerful but you need to realise that it is media agnostic.  That is any track can accommodate any media. Because audio can be next to or above video you cannot easily add an effect at an edit point. And because there are effectively infinite vertical tracks you need to tell blender which media strips need to be used for an effect.

That is why you must first select the strips to effect then add an effect. If you want to fade from many mixed clips to black for example you would simply key frame the opacity of the top most in coming black strip.